GSA officials aim to have reorganization nearly complete by fall

The General Services Administration hopes to wrap up 90 percent of its ongoing restructuring effort by September, the agency's acquisition chief said Tuesday.

The reorganization, which began in September 2005, is a merger of two previously separate procurement services into the Federal Acquisition Service. Lawmakers encouraged the move after scandals rocked some of GSA's regional offices.

"Our goal for 2006 is to have 90 percent of that reorganization in place by September," Emily Murphy, GSA's chief acquisition officer, said at a luncheon hosted by INPUT, a Reston, Va.-based market research firm. "People will know where they fit. They'll know what their responsibilities are and have clear lines of authority."

As part of the reorganization, the staff for the Center for Acquisition Excellence will be moved within the chief acquisition officer's office, Murphy said. More than 3,000 training opportunities for civilians will be available by the end of the year, she added.

"It is unprecedented access to training to really improve the quality of our acquisition workforce," said Murphy, who is GSA's first full-time acquisition officer. "By the end of 2006, we are going to have a workforce that has access to better opportunities for education, better tools in their toolkit and can better deliver on that best value promise that we at GSA are trying to make."

Murphy said that by the end of February, GSA hopes to publish a Federal Register notice seeking input on how the agency should revise its acquisition manual to make it more amenable to vendors and government agencies.

Warren Suss, president of Suss Consulting Inc. in Jenkintown, Pa., said that the reorganization is taking too long and GSA risks losing "a lot more good people" if it is not finished quickly.

"There's been a long period of turmoil over there at GSA, and they should move as aggressively as they can," Suss said. "Improving manuals and training will help, but I'm not sure it'll make the difference for many agencies."

Suss said it makes sense to focus agencies' complex acquisition functions in GSA. If GSA does a good job training its employees and communicating its effectiveness to other agencies, it may be able to win more confidence, he said.

While agencies go to GSA for their "plain vanilla needs," they look elsewhere for more sensitive procurement needs, Suss said.

"I'm concerned that a lot of the impetus behind the reorganization is driven by cost concerns," Suss said. "A lot of the motivation is to reduce overlapping functions and to reduce GSA overhead and to reduce the perception of risk. That alone won't do it. GSA needs to become a trusted partner of the agencies."

The acting head of the Federal Acquisition Service, Marty Wagner, said in December that while he could not provide a timetable, he would be doing as much as possible to complete the reorganization. GSA needs the approval of Congress and the president, however, to combine the separate funds allocated to the two previously separate acquisition services.