New guy on the block in White House Office of Federal Procurement Policy

Procurement chief seeks sharing of contract pricing data, star recruits

His three top priorities are buying smarter, creating effective relationships with government suppliers and developing the acquisition workforce.

By stressing transparency, agencies and contractors can be assured that contract awards are made on “real facts and decision criteria” while curbing waste, fraud and abuse.

“There’s also an oversight component,” he added, describing “timely enforcement against the few bad actors” by making it clear enough cops are on the beat. “Suspension and debarment should not mean flaying in the public square, but should be a deterrent that prevents” bad behavior from the outset, Jordan said.

Equally important is “getting data and aligning incentives” so that agency contracting officers don’t feel they’re being punished when they’re asked for data about whether they got the best price, he said.

His third priority, developing the acquisition workforce, means planning beyond the 36,000 contracting officers (two-thirds of them at the Pentagon) to the broader population of program managers and post-award contract officer representatives. At the White House, “we make it clear that acquisition is not an ancillary function but a core of what we do. People perk up when they see we’re talking about real money,” Jordan added.

Buying smarter means “instead of operating as 130 mid-size entities engaging vendors and one-off awards, we should amp up strategic sourcing in a thoughtful and strategic way that leverages buying power and achieve other goals such as reducing high-risk contracting,” Jordan said. The best model is the General Services Administration’s OS2 Strategic Sourcing vehicle for office supplies, which steers 76 percent of contract dollars to small businesses and is on pace to save $250 million by end of 2013, he said.

Some agencies have so little understanding of what their “sister agencies pay for commodities, it’s shocking,” said Joe Jordan, newly installed administrator of the White House Office of Federal Procurement Policy. The “paucity of pricing data” in one case involving bulk purchases of BlackBerry mobile devices meant a price variance of 100 percent, he said

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