The Department of Health and Human Services’ Program Support Center handles more than $1.4 billion in contracts for other agencies as part of its assisted acquisition services offering.
Program Support Center customer agencies include the Office of Personnel Management, the Office of Special Counsel, the Environmental Protection Agency and most notably the Defense Department. In fact, DoD accounts for about $1 billion of that total.
Unfortunately for those and many other agencies, HHS is pulling the rug out from under them at possibly the worst time.
Internal memos obtained by Federal News Network show HHS decided to stop offering assisted acquisition services on June 14 just as agencies were gearing up for the fourth quarter buying season, one which many experts say will be even busier than normal because of the 35-day government shutdown.
This means all new acquisitions are stopped, including a $150 million multiple-award contract PSC was close to awarding for EPA and numerous in-process contracts for DoD.
It also means that any award made over the last four years must be moved to other agencies or absorbed by the home agency by Sept. 30, 2020. This basically gives agencies 15 months to move existing contracts.
The reason HHS gave for immediately discontinuing its assisted acquisition services: “As the result of an internal review that is ongoing, PSC has determined that it does not have the policies, procedures or internal controls necessary to conduct assisted acquisitions for agencies outside of HHS,” the agency wrote in a memo to civilian agency customers.
In a similar memo to DoD customers, HHS said it can no longer certify that it complies with the requirement in Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) 17.7 and in the 2008 National Defense Authorization Act that “requires the heads of all non-DoD agencies that provide acquisition support to DoD to certify that their respective non-Defense agencies will comply with defense procurement requirements for fiscal 2019 for assisted acquisitions executed on behalf of DoD in FY 2019.”
Continue reading at: Federal News Network
