House OKs bill to streamline purchasing
The Acquisition Streamlining Improvement Act extends for two years the pilot program authorizing streamlined procedures for commercially available goods and services.
The House of Representatives passed the Acquisition Streamlining Improvement Act April 9, which will extend for two years the Clinger-Cohen Act's pilot program authorizing streamlined acquisition procedures for commercially available goods and services.
The bill "could not have come at a more urgent time, as the extension will greatly enhance the ability of the Pentagon to rapidly rebuild by September of this year and will allow agencies to make acquisitions in the competitive marketplace more efficiently and rapidly," said Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va. The pilot program was to expire at the end of this year.
Davis and Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., sponsored the bill, H.R. 3921. Burton chairs the House Government Reform Committee; Davis chairs its subcommittee on technology and procurement policy.
The streamlined procedures apply to purchases of $5 million or less when a contracting officer expects that responses to a solicitation will only include commercial items. The procedures allow using shorter deadlines, fewer government-unique requirements and minimized administrative costs. This authority was recently used to help repair the damage the Pentagon sustained from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
"If an item is available commercially and at a competitive price, the government should not have to go through a long, drawn-out procurement process," Davis said on the House floor. "Where there are several competitors in an item's marketplace, and this competition is keeping prices in line, then streamlined acquisition procedures make sense. They save time. They save money. They make the government run more efficiently."
The Defense Department used the pilot program authority to buy routers and switches to re-establish the communications grid at the Pentagon after the attacks.
"Using conventional procurement procedures to buy this equipment would have added many extra months and would have jeopardized the whole [rebuilding] project's completion by the one-year anniversary" of the attacks, Davis said.