This commentary was adapted from a White House blog posted by Office of Federal Procurement Administrator Daniel Gordon.

As part of the administration’s campaign to cut waste, OMB’s Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP) released guidance (Sept. 29) to reduce wasteful duplication in federal contracting.

Too often in the past, agency spending for many commonly-used items was fragmented across multiple departments, programs, and components, which means that agencies often spent time writing hundreds of separate contracts, with pricing that varies widely. The result is a waste of limited staff time and energy, and prices that are not as good as they should be.

At a cabinet meeting earlier this month, Vice President Biden pointed out that by leveraging their purchasing power agencies can save taxpayer dollars. He directed each agency leader to conduct a waste and efficiency review, targeting unnecessary or inefficient spending in areas like contracting.

OFPP’s new guidance will aid agencies in eliminating waste and carrying out the reviews ordered by the vice president by addressing concerns, raised by GAO and others, that agencies may be unnecessarily duplicating each other’s contracting efforts. This guidance requires agencies to prepare “business cases” – analyses to ensure they aren’t duplicating an existing contract and that they are getting the best value for taxpayers- before they establish or renew certain interagency and agency-specific contracts for commonly-used goods and services, such as office supplies and wireless services.

Doing this kind of due diligence and comparison-shopping is something that many families across the country do, and it is especially important that the Federal government weigh all the options before entering into large contracts and agreements whose scope would overlap contracts that already exist. In the business case, agencies are required to balance the value of creating a new contract against the benefit of using an existing one, and whether the expected return from investment in the proposed contract is worth the taxpayer resources. Insisting on that cost/benefit analysis in the business cases should go a long way to avoiding duplicative contracts.

The progress we’ve made in this area is a key reason why we think GAO should take interagency contracting off its ‘high risk’ list.” Keep reading →