GSA Blog

Focusing on Healthy and Productive Industry Relationships - Regulatory Reform Task Force

Editor’s Note: This is the fifth in a series of blogs about how GSA is fostering healthy and productive industry relationships. Be sure to read the first, second, third and fourth posts.

In meetings with our industry partners and industry associations, we’ve often heard about the need for regulatory reform. GSA has been listening, and last year, we established a Regulatory Reform Task Force. The task force represents our opportunity to eliminate outdated, ineffective, and unnecessary regulations and policies We reached out to industry, and to employees all across the agency asking them to make sure we identified all the good candidates for updating or eliminating.

Subsequently, GSA issued two deregulatory rules that reduced costs and increased flexibility for agencies and industry in use of the Federal Supply Schedules. This includes the Order Level Materials Rule which permits orders under the Schedules program to include up to one third open market items, and a rule simplifying application of commercial software licenses. Both rules were substantially improved by comments made during the rulemaking process. GSA also streamlined certain construction contracts and reduced industry costs by removing unnecessary bid guarantee and payment bond requirements for small disadvantaged contractors under the SBA 8(a) Program. In partnership with the CIO, we eliminated one General Services Administration Acquisition Regulation (GSAR) clause, one provision, nine CIO policies, and we reduced 12 more CIO policies. Finally, in an effort to streamline the overall process, GSA identified and eliminated over 230 outdated Federal Acquisition Service (FAS) policies which were slowing procurement actions and increasing costs.

As we look forward, GSA’s Unified Regulatory Agenda includes four more deregulatory actions for FY 2019. Each of these will decrease the cost of doing business with GSA. The planned changes: 1. Transition to the Government-wide Mentor-Protege Program, 2. End the requirement to print and distribute Schedule price lists, 3. Establish a new project delivery method for construction projects, and 4. Consolidate all the CIO policies in one place.

Thank you for reading along with me for this blog series. We look forward to our continued partnership.