Originally published OMB preaches patience, flexibility as acquisition reforms take off on by https://federalnewsnetwork.com/ask-the-cio/2025/04/omb-preaches-patience-flexibility-as-acquisition-reforms-take-off/ at Federal News Network
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When it comes to revamping 41 years of acquisition rules and regulations, the White House official leading this effort has a simple request.
Kevin Rhodes, a senior advisor at the Office of Management and Budget, is asking for a little patience and flexibility.
“This is going to be a little bit turbulent as the FAR is written and parts are being released and so forth, for comprehension sake. So be comprehensive of that and consider that, but the team will take those comments at face value, and we’ll try to make them work and useful. To characterize it or to capture it, work with the team as we go through this process, we will listen. That doesn’t mean everything will be adjusted or changed based on the inputs we get, but we will listen,” said Rhodes on Ask the CIO. “I would ask just for that as the team works through this there are a lot of people working very hard to overcome, again, a bureaucracy that has been built over four decades. That means it cannot be changed overnight. But the first thing is we have formally recognized with the President’s direction we are going to get after this problem.”
President Donald Trump signed two executive orders on April 15 officially kicking off a major part of his administration’s federal acquisition revamp. One of the orders is requiring OMB, the General Services Administration, the Federal Acquisition Regulatory Council and agencies to rewrite the FAR to include only regulations that are statutorily required or that ensures efficiency and effective acquisition.
The second EO is trying to reinvigorate the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act’s requirement to buy commercial products and services whenever possible.
Both orders set up several deadlines, including the initial draft of the new FAR within six months.
OMB is setting up a website to bring transparency to the procurement process. It will highlight regulatory updates, buyer guides and the overall reform process.
“I think industry, government and other stakeholders in general will be pleasantly surprised with the transparency and the ability to comment on the changes that they will see,” he said. “The team will ask for input. The team will not do this in a vacuum, and so it will be transparent. It will be engaging, and it will be iterative. So if the team misses something, and it is identified that, ‘Hey, we need to reconsider this,’ the team will reconsider it. This is collectively for all of us to make the procurement system better. It will be transparent, it will be collaborative and it will be useful.”
Implementation guidance coming
One key step in this transparency process is OMB implementation guidance, which Rhodes said is coming shortly.
Several industry experts and former federal officials say that implementation guidance is a key guidepost in this effort.
Alan Thomas, the former commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service at GSA and now founder of AlphaTango Strategies, said bringing together so many different people’s views on what is essential to a well-functioning procurement system may be difficult.
“They want to do some deviations and waivers to start with, and then have the rule making process follow. You might have a field testing period, where we have these deviations and waivers out there, and then the traditional rule making process follows,” Thomas said during a recent panel discussion sponsored by the Greg and Camille Baroni Center for Government Contracting at the George Mason University. “We’ll see how that goes. They’re also going to need to engage the Hill at some point. There hasn’t been a lot of engagement with the Hill yet by that team that’s doing the FAR rewrite. I think if you really want to drive change, you’re probably going to need some statutory change, and that’s going to require the folks over in the legislature there to weigh in. So it will be interesting to see how that process plays out.”
There seems to be growing support between the Hill and the Trump administration on acquisition reform.
There are a lot of similarities between the EOs and Sen. Roger Wicker’s (R-Miss.) Forge Act. Wicker is the chairman of the Armed Services Committee.
Eric Lofgren, a professional staff member on the Seapower and Acquisition subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said at the GMU event that the focus has to be on implementation even more so than having the right policies and laws.
Moving DoD to a portfolio approach
Lofgren said that’s part of what the Forge Act is trying to get at — ensuring DoD has the right requirements process and the budgeting process tied together with the acquisition process.
“I think the concept is around the idea of portfolio management. Can we have an acquisition strategy where I’m not saying I’m going to buy a drone from company X, and it exactly looks like this, but I’m setting a capability set where I can have repeated competition, depending on the opportunities and the technology advancement, without having to go back through a milestone decision authority? Can we have requirements that allow for such flexibility in the capability design document or development document? Or maybe we don’t even need those types of requirements,” Lofgren said. “The same with budgeting. If we have a line item that is basically a company and a very specific program, it takes out the optionality from not just the contracting officers, but also the pricing has basically been telegraphed beforehand to the contractor. That’s the one that is going to be probably the hardest to accomplish, I would expect. But it’s about aligning the three legs of the acquisition stool around those issues and performing them with a concerted vision.”
Lofgren said he expects several of the provisions in the Forge Act to make it into the fiscal 2026 Defense authorization bill, but he doesn’t expect the entire legislation to be its own section. But one big focus that should make the NDAA is the beginning to improve certain aspects of the appropriations process.
“We’re not completely restructuring the appropriation accounts. That would be a huge task. The first thing we want to do is just consolidate some budget line items. There’s just too many lines and they’re too micromanaged. I think a third of budget lines are under $10 million and you’re basically programming that two years in advance of receipt, and so that creates a real friction there,” he said. “So start with consolidating some budget lines. We’re trying to remove some of the barriers. Can we remove some of the strictures which say budget lines have to look a certain way, and allow the department to organize and propose them. Then we’ll work that over the next few years, and then once we start getting into rational portfolio structures, then we can start thinking about much bigger moves in terms of what are we going to do with authorities through the continuing resolutions, and whether we really rethink about appropriations accounts.”
Jerry McGinn, the executive director of the Greg & Camille Baroni Center for Government Contracting at GMU, said OMB still must address the workforce challenges with so many people leaving the federal government.
He said while much of the changes the Trump administration is proposing makes sense, the question of execution still needs to be answered.
“When you’ve got all these different initiatives, who’s going to do all the work and implement them?” McGinn said. “You’ve got to be able to drive these reforms through policy change. And that’s a big focus because they’re talking about changing evaluation structures for the workforce. Those are going to be the key for implementation around what they propose in terms of investment, in terms of budget, and then how do they drive policy change, beyond just memos from the from the deputy or executive that driving the policy change.”
OMB’s Rhodes said the administration acknowledges there is a lot of work ahead and not every question has a final answer.
“We’re all in this together, industry and the government. We all are in this to deliver a capability for the United States government, whatever it is for our success,” he said. “So I’d ask that you keep that in mind as we work through this because all of us play a vital role in successful outcomes, and we look forward to what is on the other side of this. I think we’ll all collectively be very proud of where we end up.”
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Originally published OMB preaches patience, flexibility as acquisition reforms take off on by https://federalnewsnetwork.com/ask-the-cio/2025/04/omb-preaches-patience-flexibility-as-acquisition-reforms-take-off/ at Federal News Network
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