GSA’s procurement moves reaping major discounts for government

GSA announced this week that the agency is establishing a centralized travel service to provide for government travel ordered by agencies, which — the announcement of this service suggests — may be mandatory for federal agencies to use.

There has been a longstanding, ongoing debate within the federal procurement community about to what extent buying decisions should rest with individual agency customers or with a centralized buying operation such as GSA. 

For many years after GSA was founded in 1949, the philosophy was to put a lot of control in GSA. Originally, agencies could not buy IT on their own without getting GSA approval. 

The philosophy of Al Gore’s “Reinventing Government” initiative from the nineties was to move in the opposite direction by giving agency buyers control (to let buyers “go shopping” on their own, to use the phrase often used at the time) and keeping GSA as far out of the picture as possible.

The sides of the debate are pretty straightforward. Agency-level buying gives these organizations greater control over their destiny. Centralized buying provides an opportunity to negotiate volume discounts that save agencies money.

I was in the government during the reinventing government years, but despite that, I was actually not fully sympathetic with the reinventing government approach and often argued for quantity buys. It made no sense, I argued, for the largest buyer in the world to get a deal no better than I as an individual consumer could get by going to a local store.

Though I do not see myself in general as a supporter of the Trump administration, I believe the direction in which GSA has been moving on this issue is a good one. So I am pleased, in general, to see the administration’s move to centralize travel buys. In particular, I am happy to see that the government will be getting a significant quantity discount for this buy.

I have only one reservation: namely, that it appears that use of this service will be compulsory. Monopoly is a recipe for poor customer service and deteriorating prices over time. This was the lesson of the government’s earlier experiment with GSA control.

This service should sell itself as a best value alternative to other ways to buy travel. Let it succeed on its own merits, not based on a GSA command.