Eight years after the Obama administration began importing the private-sector procurement tool known as “category management,” the Trump administration on Thursday rescinded old directives and delivered new agency guidance.
In a March 21 memo to all agency heads, Office of Management and Budget Deputy Director Margaret Weichert—who is doing double duty running the Office of Personnel Management — tasked agencies with a new reporting regime for shared services that “supersedes and rescinds” OMB directives from 2011 and 2012.
Category management involves agency teams coordinating bulk purchasing in areas such as information technology, security and protection, and transportation. Weichert’s memo reported that as much as 56 percent of the government’s $325 billion in purchases of software, mobile services, technology services and travel remained “unaligned” or decentralized, as of December 2018.
“This statistic confirms that substantial cost-avoidances and performance benefits are going unrealized and underscores the need for greater management attention on collaborative buying at both the federal and agency levels by increasing the portion of an agency’s spend” using category management, the memo said.
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The government 
The General Services Administration (GSA) is planning to “refresh” all GSA Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) solicitations and issue a mass modification to existing contracts in April. The changes include:
A new vendor is taking over management of the vendor verification system run through the General Services Administration, ending
The General Services Administration, on behalf of the Air Force, has kicked off a multiple-award acquisition that could be worth up to $5.5 billion.
Federal agencies have long been afforded wide discretion in defining solicitation requirements to meet their contracting needs. But are a solicitation’s requirements acceptable even where they’re likely to conflict with local zoning codes? What about where the solicitation documents conflict with one another on whether certain requirements are considered “requirements” at all? And finally, is an LPTA procurement acceptable where such conflicts have undoubtedly led to price uncertainty among the bidders?
In 
The General Services Administration has released a request for quotation for Phase One of its Center of Excellence discovery services, laying the groundwork for GSA to set up CoEs at new partner agencies.
On December 20, 2018, the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) was amended to clarify the FAR’s prohibition on assessing employees with recruitment fees in connection with federal contracts. The rule provides a final definition of “recruitment fees” and clarifies the FAR’s broad prohibition on federal contractors or subcontractors assessing employees or potential employees with any such fees.
The Pentagon took the next step in bidding out its Defense Enterprise Office Solutions contract Friday, Feb. 1st,