FAST GSA Virtual Acquisition Summit FY26 Day 1

Slide presentations are available for download through June 12, and the text transcript from the event is below the table.

Day 1, April 14

FAST GSA Virtual Acquisition Summit FY26 Day 1 transcript

There may be errors, omissions, or inaccuracies in this transcript.

Opening

KELLY WHITFIELD: Take a moment to answer the polling questions, and tell us where you are joining from in the chat. With that, I am going to go ahead and get started.

Hello, everyone. I am Kelly Whitfield, I will be your host today. Thank you and welcome to the FAST GSA Virtual Acquisition Summit event. We will be exploring upcoming changes, innovative technologies and policies that will shape federal acquisition and program management.

This is a two-day event. Today and tomorrow, five hours each day, we do give you a lunch break, so do not worry. You do get a little lunch break and there. If you attend today and tomorrow, you can earn up to 10 CLP. That is five CLP per day if you attend. You do not have to attend both days. You do only get CLP for the days that you do attend.

We do start both days at 9:00 a.m. Eastern and in that 3:00 p.m. Eastern each day, and you are able to download the slides from today or the past and a page and we will share that with you in the chat. There will also be closed captions we are sharing in the chat. We will post the most frequently asked questions or the FAQ of follow up on the event page as well.

I will now pass it to my co-host, Tamika.

TAMIKA COLEMAN: Hello, I am Tamika Coleman, just a few quick housekeeping items before we get in today. Today’s presentation is being recorded and if you do not consent to recorded, please drop off of the line. We will begin recording now.

A closed captioning link will be shared in the chat and you can use it to follow along or download today’s transcript. All attendees are and listen only mode. Audience interaction will take place in the polls, chat, emoji’s in the Q&A at the bottom of your screen. We will review whole results shortly to see who is with us today. You can submit questions at any time using the Q&A and upload questions you would like to address live. Due to time constraints, answering questions will be responded to in writing and posted to the event websites. CLP will be issued within three weeks after the event. Five CLP per day with up to 10 CLP available if you attend both days. No audio cutout CLP will show up within three to four weeks. Kelly, how do we see the poll results.

KELLY WHITFIELD: Let’s go ahead and see and everyone has hopefully had a chance to answer the questions. If you do not answer the poll, do not worry, it is not how we track attendance. We dislike the feedback to see who our audience is.

Hopefully, everyone see the responses now, what is your job title. Mostly CORs. We have a range of other job titles. A lot of CO, a lot of contract specialists, and lots of others. I find that interesting. We will have to see it we can figure out the others at some point. How long have you worked in the acquisition field? It looks like most of you have said more than 15 years. We have very well season acquisition professionals here. We have a lot of one to five year period nice range.

The last one, to what extent does the acquisition environment or work change over the past year? Most said moderately. Please close out your polling window.

Let’s go ahead and jump in today’s presentation. Thank you very much, and let’s go ahead. Our first session is FAR overhaul and what it means from your acquisition strategy. You will hear from experts leading the FAR and the latest information about changes to the FAR and you will get a practical overview upcoming changes in how agencies are talking about slowing mission delivery. We are joined by some very capable members of the FAR team within GSA office of Government wide policy.

Without further due, I will hand it over and I will let the RFO team members introduce themselves. Danielle and Monica, the floor is yours. Thank you for joining us.

DANIELLE MOUW: Thank you. Monica, do you want to start?

MONICA TAYLOR: I see people are coming from all around the US and other places. Welcome. I am Monica Taylor, I have been detailed to support the work stream since April of last year. My home agency’s Department of Homeland Security, but opportunity to help inform these resources. Excited to talk with you up to date and really dive in how it will affect the acquisition strategy. Danielle, I will let you introduce yourself.

DANIELLE MOUW: I am so excited to be here with Monica and I’m learning a lot from her every day and we have an incredible partnership here at GSA with the entire practitioner team. I am currently co leading GSA Lab pilots, and we will talk about that later today, but super excited to see we have such a mixed audience, and we really want your excitement, enthusiasm, if you can give emoji’s and ask questions and will enjoy the interactivity today.

FAR overhaul

MONICA TAYLOR: We will really start with what is the revolution with the overhaul? Just let me know in the chat if you’re tracking the overhaul and I know there is a heavy COR presence and would love to know if you’re tracking it, if you have had the opportunity to look at the website. There is no right or wrong answer, just like to get a feel when we have these conversations.

The revolutionary FAR overhaul, this is one of the most comprehensive of overall so far since it just had a birthday, April 1. Over 40 years. This was by mandates and was grounded in executive order 13275.

That was restoring to the federal procurement. This is a pivotal opportunity to align the acquisition policy with today’s mission, needs, technologies and really market dynamics. What it really was, the ask and the mandate in executive order in the memo 2526, which there are slides and you can get the slides as well, but the RFO initiative, the goal was to return the FAR to the statutory roots and rewrite it in plain language. The other was to remove any non statutory rules unless it was essential for procurement. That was important. One of the things coming from a CO experience, CO at Government accountability office and also my experience at Department of Homeland Security, this was an opportunity where the team intentionally brought in both policy and practitioner at the table to truly take this effort on of overhauling the FAR.

It went fast. For those following along we will talk a little bit about the way it occurred, but the goal was to remove nonstatutory rules unless it was sound. Is this statutory, is this nonstatutory? Is it good business practice. For those out there, I like to share one of the nonstatutory things was the bilateral module. That is important. That was a sound practice to maintain.

Also, Danielle will talk about a created nonregulatory buying guide that provided practical strategies grounded and best practices as well. It is a shift, so we will dive in. Please ask your questions in the chat or the Q&A pod and we will get started.

One of the things is with this, the goal was streamlining the actual RF 0 and FAR resulting in a new FAR framework. Let me know if you have read the new framework. I love to know where those who are tracking, have you had an opportunity? Give me a thumbs up if you had an opportunity to dive in 1.101. Some say it is a little new to you. It introduced this new guidance, the non regulatory tools. This was an opportunity consolidating those things.

This was a streamlining FAR and the agency regulations and everyone may be coming from different agencies that you are representing the agency regulations and nonregulatory regulations that is the FAR Companion and the category management buying guide. We have a lot of different agencies represented and we can see this come through.

These resources are living resources that will be updated to reflect the best practices. We will get in those as well as we go throughout today.

There is a new FAR toolkit, and we will talk about this. The revolutionary FAR overhaul or RFO depending on your agency, you would have adopted the RFO and there is a supplement of policy and there is also another piece you may have seen, and I love the participation in the chat. Let me know if you have heard of the smart accelerator. This word got created and it was truly something at the team may have just come up with and thought the smart accelerator.

There was another nonregulatory resource. It’s not part of the framework that is in the FAR, so an RFO 1.101, the RFO says this is the framework and acquisition buying guide and it links you to the FAR Companion. It is recognized to empower the workforce saying we want to empower the workforce and give them tools during their plan.

I always like to ask this question, and it went out we heard from a different user experience. Anyone have a copy of the physical FAR? I wish I had it here to grab. Did anyone have the lake document? I remember when I came in the government in 2007, I had this textbook and I thought I have to replace my tabs.

One of the things that the FAR, we always say that the FAR empowered and emphasized discretion, but there is a further emphasis of government wide with the actual overhaul. As part of that memo, you have how the overhaul was to occur. As part of that, when you are looking at 1.102, it always said the role of the acquisition team is to exercise personal initiatives and sound business judgments. A caveat is a specific strategy or practice or policy, if that is in best interest of the government, prohibited by case law statute, it is permissible exercising the authority and those who are in 1102 space that is the 1102 plug right there.

This is written in more plain language emphasizing mission first and that portion of the strategy is in the best interest not prohibited by law. You are allowed to use it, and there is empowering the CO at the lowest level. We are all relearning for sure.

I want to talk a little bit about where we are today. I saw a plethora of agencies. We are going to take a moment to share the acquisition.gov website, but how did we get here? The executive order 14275 was issued and then we ended up using a class deviation model and this is part of the first time this was used to do this to overhaul. There are 49 deviations issued to allow for immediate use while formal rulemaking proceeds. You may think why did they go about it this way? This is an opportunity to test the language and use that language before rulemaking. Rulemaking can take some time, so this was a way to be able to test from the original codified FAR to the RFO if the agency has a be aided to the phase one model DBA since. Not every agency has accepted all-ready nine model deviations. Rough agency implementation and adoption may differ, but if your agency has issued a deviation, you are operating under the RFO for that. If your agency has not issued the deviation, you will be operating under the codified. We are in phase two until those rules are going through the internal reviews, and we will eventually go through formal ruling and the process to get in the codified.

We just have to say that we shifted because it is a lot of change and we are in a period of change, but a great opportunity to streamline and find ways to lean into different innovations.

Another quick trivia, and I would like to know, how would you or how do you check to see if your agency has issued modern deviation? We are at a high number of the agencies who have issued all deviations, I don’t know if I have cap this as it was 19 plus and was a large amount. Normally we get an e mail, acquisition.gov, RO.

For those who may not know how to check it, we will show where you can, you can locate the acquisition.gov.

DANIELLE MOUW: Let’s give it up to Monica. We will go back to her in a little bit, but I love teaching with her, we have a lot of fun. I know the FAR is kind of dry and not the most interesting topic, but we try to make it as fun as possible because what we are most excited about is the new framework. We have moved from compliance based to decision making to discretion based. Risk informed decision making. We are giving you back the cover to use discretion and really what your risk and give you room and space to innovate. As a quick reminder, she talked about the regulatory tools and the regulatory environment consisting with all of these new RFO parts.

This GSAR is the supplement, and you have to use all of this together in the new environment. We will consult with the nonregulatory recommended best practices. I will talk a little bit about the FAR Companion and show you where all of these live on the. gov, but think about the FAR Companion as your how to guidance that came out of the FAR. We are getting out of the space of prescribing and regulatory environment and that is that there are minimum requirements in the RFO now. Of all of the best practice how to guidance is in the FAR Companion.

When you think about what you’re buying and what category of spend your income that is that buying guide to give you all kinds of amazing pathways for that race on what you are buying. You use the smart accelerators and practitioner albums and if you are an agency with a lab or standing up testing and coaching, you are building training, that is the other part of the environment supporting the change management piece of this.

I want to talk a little bit about you all and then I will show you the sites. We are trying to bridge the regulatory shift in the practice with you. That means we have a new RFO and it does not really matter if you don’t have the courage to try it out. Use the discretion. We are hoping like constantly socializing what your system looks like, hoping you to understand we have moved from issuing trade policy to giving you best practice tools that live and evolve and designed by practitioners for practitioners and that is really going to help you feel confident you are heard and seen and you have support to lean in the new environment. These are new best practices that you try and test things out. We will talk more about that, but that’s what this new environment consists of.

There is a method to the madness even though we are in the in between state. The purpose is to test it out before we issue the new FAR. Let’s go to the website or just a moment. I will show you the .gov. For the non GSA personnel, everyone in the space, this is your hub to go to to learn about everything RFO related Monica and I just shared on the slides. I will pop this in here. Bookmark the link if you are at a computer, you can open it up with me. I will teach you how to fish for the resources and support you need.

All RFO parts are here. Monica just explained how we went down in the numbers as there are parts that are consolidated, condensed, plain language. We have taken out prescriptive language and moved all at the how to the FAR Companion. This is the new framework area, and we have the trivia question on how to find the agency deviation and you can hit that button to make it go down and you will see the agency deviation list here.

You can identify if the agency is leaning in this or not.

When you go to this button you have the FAR Companion and that opens up this document. Super excited to talk more about this. It is organized by FAR and has citations that go FC and a number and you can click here or hit control F and it will talk about best practices, accelerators and reference the periodic table of innovation acquisition and give you tips to lean in approaches when you are in part six and you are doing market research. You will see all of these amazing suggestions that you can lean in. I highly recommend everyone check out the FAR Companion. We have a button that takes you to the category management buying guide. As I said before, Monica will detail this today when she talks about acquisition strategy and planning, but there is a five-step process to using it based on what you are buying, validating you know exactly what category spend you are in.

Are you working with professional services, construction and after you do that, you will lean in all pre completed or required sources vehicle based on the dollar thresholds that will allow you to think of a commercial first approach and that space. We don’t want to reinvent the will and go open market as it is much less efficient and more risky. We had the built in clauses and safeguards and the precomputed vehicles there to support you. Lean in that where it makes sense where things are low and built.

Back to this site, we have an FAQ, a list of all practitioner albums and this is an amazing place to go. Organized by part and when trying to understand accelerators and the FAR Companion tool and you are not sure, I highly recommend you look at the map practitioner albums. You can earn CL for trying it out and it will point you to use cases and examples to do the work in the space.

Does that make sense? There is a lot of resources and everything you can get to from this single page. This is the hub, if you will.

One more cool thing about this FAR being a book. This is where you can go to get the new PDF and this will get updated. You go in the specific parts, and you are looking here and you can open this up and download a copy of the PDF. A little bit about the websites. Really, the folks with Monica and the team did a phenomenal job designing that. Monica was integral to designing the FAR Companion. Talking about the resources for you all.

That is unheard of and this is a once in a career moment and this FAR Companion is about you being able to felt supported and applying judgment and the discretion. The category management buying guide, all of these things working in concert with your RFO parts, regulations and organized by what you are buying.

Quick trivia before we turn it back over to Monica to talk with you about acquisition strategy and planning. How do you envision leveraging the FAR Companion and category management buying guide to inform your acquisition strategy? If you don’t know the answer to this, I want you to think about what I just shared as the companion is about how and the buying guide is what and the pathway for commercial vehicles and pre completed vehicles, be thinking of how you will use this as she is talking about strategies and tools for better and more streamlined acquisition strategy planning.

Research, getting an idea, you are trying to figure out where to start. Okay. I will take it over to Monica and I will monitor the chat.

MONICA TAYLOR: Sounds good. Danielle mentioned in the commercial first procurement strategy and that was one of the other executive orders you may have seen earlier and that also is what the RFO was grounded in. When we think of the RFO FAR and if it is deviated and the FAR Companion, that is at discretion and the FAR Companion is nonstatutory and no reason to document or use a policy or a suggestion within it, but it is a resource that really is an opportunity for us to do all of the great things we’re doing with the individual agencies.

Sometimes we are doing it in a silo, so this can inform some best planning or best practices for the acquisition planning. Having engagement industry. Let me know if during the market research, if you have one on ones and the appetite for that can differ according to agencies. Some agencies lean in 101 after the RFI and Sam it is a little taboo and they don’t take advantage. The importance of engaging with industry is within the FAR Companion. We will dive in these and the category management buying guides, the practitioner albums and also testing and coaching that is another piece are teamed as of finding the stories.

We have to put the language to use to really know if it is working, where is the improvement in the resources.

Quickly, I want to share these are RFO part seven and one of the things with comprehensive acquisition planning, but streamlined procedures for those that are most advantageous to the government.

The next was the RFO part eight and this was the governmentwide contract. We take about six hours to really go through the high level changes and in the 90 minutes we cannot go through it all, but there are many emphasis on commercial first buying and RFO 8, RFO 12 that is the simplified acquisitions. This is the baseline of leveraging and assisting contracts, at some time there may be some required use contracts and those do not exist yet, but that was in RFO 8.

We will jump right in one of the things that I want to talk about his acquisition planning. Let me know if you have had an opportunity to read RFO 7, the new text? One of the really big shifts was shifting acquisition planning from the document center process. Let me know how long was your acquisition plan? About how long is that GSO 7 plan? I have seen 20, 27 pages, 15 to 20 pages are always in that document.

DANIELLE MOUW: We will get a little more streamlined, bent at least 50 pages for some people.

MONICA TAYLOR: Sometimes your answering questions where it may be a small purchase and as an opportunity for us to right size our plan and be more collaborative. Rather than passing paper and did you fill out question five, what is that answer and how can we collaborate with our actual mission to really make sure we meet the mission needs and not just filling out paperwork, if that makes sense.

RFO 10, informing us market research is an element of landing. Not looking at it as two distinct things. I do market research and acquisition planning, but it should form all of those things, but looking at it holistically. What we want to really talk about and share. I saw some thumbs up at the RFO 7 and I will give you some of the highlights. One of the things was we must perform acquisition planning for all acquisitions. That did not change, but one of the things there is an emphasis and his agency should establish procedures to determine when a written or oral acquisition plan is required.

See 7.103. It does not say we cannot do an oral acquisition plan, but there is an emphasis on a callout in the RFO text. The agency heads are to determine what that looks like. I will say if you are not within GSA and you are within other agencies, your agency may leave it up to you. Phase two agencies are to streamlined their own internal regulations to allow for some of the innovations in different things that empower and things we are given in the article.

7.103, read that as the content of the written acquisition plan was made to the FAR Companion. Every acquisition plan must address this and it’s really important you are acquisition plan addresses the four bullet points or the four items you see on the screen that is available for making the informed decisions, support for taking all actions and necessary action is available or investigation and facts are available in case anything arises.

A written plan is required for reimbursement of the high risk contracts and that is something that was always there. Agencies are determining what fits the oral acquisition plan. There will be a cool story later that will be shared where we see teams utilize and lean in those acquisition plans from a small dollars 2 million dollar requirements.

Market research, has you think of planning, it is conducting market research appropriate to circumstances. How do you do your research? Are you looking on different vehicles, hosting, doing sources sought? Looking at federal supplies. I love when people say all of the things. Engaging with industry and having the conversation and could that be appropriate to the circumstances for looking at the oversimplified acquisition. We want to document in that complexity.

DANIELLE MOUW: Some say they just call us at GSA. We do have some great accelerators and the space of the market research that is a service tool and those are in the albums.

MONICA TAYLOR: If we go to the next, this is Danielle who is going to share about the acquisition plan. What are you talking about?

DANIELLE MOUW: I am super excited to share with you. She has been integral in helping coach some of our Teams at GSA. Monica is terrific, and that is what it is all about is we have this new guidance that gives us flexibility and that is the RFO seven they can about it because the market research will validate if the approach needs to be more complex or temple. Then you use the accelerators and practitioner albums and at GSA, we use our handbook in addition to the FAR Companion to guide to the innovation. Other agencies will be coming up with their own ways of implementing best practice guidance and sharing that is how we are doing it at GSA and it is a living document, but we do require the workforce to check out first before they proceed and the use case I want to share is an example of the requirements we have for IT support $50 million within GSA Federal Acquisition Service or FAS.

They have a group within the division called FED SIM doing great workforce solutions for you and external agencies in the government. These are the bullet points that acquisition plans that was conducted orally touched on that. What are you buying, what was the acquisition history, what is the dollar value, what is the period of performance, market research findings, sources, competition, what type are we thinking and most requirements in this case was for firm fixed price.

A small component that was cost types of component. The seal was empowered through our handbook and our use of the FAR Companion to go ahead and have a discussion in a meeting. If you don’t have tools like we do at GSA that is Google and Gemini notetaking, you can just take notes, but we had a discussion and covered all of these elements. We had involved legal and brought them with us. With a guidance of coach and the new RFO, we were able to come to assigned and consensus codified acquisition plan in an hour.

That is on and over 50-million-dollar requirement. We gain a lot of time back and what would have been spent on the route process.

They have done this approach, we had the acquisition plan and that is a prerecorded webinar and SAIC and anyone can access that. We also have the sample. I will show it to you, and it will be linked in the slide. You can see what it looks like. There is a disclaimer that you really need to do this type of thing with your agency specific guidance and the FAR Companion, but this was the dry run using Gemini meeting notes.

We answered the questions and had all of those present for buy in of the blue responses are the answers where the requirement. Look how short this is. We are at two pages trying to keep things that are low risk and simple, simple.

That is my share, and Monica may have more things to add, but thank you.

MONICA TAYLOR: I think the important thing even if you are saying I cannot do oral acquisition plans or maybe they have not added the policy, the thing I would recommend is leaning in collaborating with your program office and collaborating with your CO and bringing them earlier to the table and your COR. We can get away from documenting and talking through the documents and informing our decisions and having conversation of this strategy work for the requirements.

We talked about the category management buying guide and there are some steps in that buying guide and I want to walk through the framework. Another question I want to ask is what FAR you typically operate in? 8, 16, 12? Some may say all, but let me know and then we will go and share what that image looks like.

If you look at this category management buying guides, we do a little deeper dive in this. We do a training on this we typically spend 20 minutes talking through this. This is a framework and for those who may default to 15, it’s an opportunity to rethink our buying. Think of this in the toolkit to really consider opportunities to breakdown the complex in more simple bias were buying opportunities to lean in is it a commercial product, is it a simple by and what is the value and finding an opportunity.

Line three is important, is this mandatory and a priority source? Those are still pending, but the consideration of the governmentwide contracts. Some of you may say there are some agencies who may not be familiar with the Federal supply schedule or may not be aware of vehicles such as NASA. It could be different depending on your agency culture. This is a framework to really frame those conversations.

Want to leave you with another item that really with the acquisition planning, when you think about the framework, is it commercial? Is it something that is simple or is it complex? Can I buy the license on one piece and really take my time for my complex portion? That will allow you to use the resources wisely, but keep that.

Ultimately, when thinking about how this feeds in the acquisition planning, it starts from the top of the RFO and the actual overhaul and making it where it is emphasizing the empowerment throughout and not just being one agency who is empowering, but encouraging all to adopt the approach. We want to right size our planning and documentation and will use written plans and detailed reports and they are not always required, but if there is a written report required, there is opportunity or how can we streamline this report? How can we collaborate and document our decisions and not necessarily all at the back and forth we may have.

Threshold flexibility or acquisitions, that is another item. If market research is not mandatory before soliciting offers, but it accelerate that cycle, but you are empowered. I really want to do some quick market research. There is no formal documentation. That was there in the codified RFO. Leveraging vehicles and establishing the category management. That is another piece. The category management buying guide, we encourage you to look through that because it is a common spend area, all different vehicles available to you and pathway pointers. It is a beta version and there are still going to be some updates to it, but it is a centralized location of all of those vehicles available to you that will save time administratively and dollar values as well.

This is a handy chart of when we think about our acquisition planning, opportunity to use the oral or written plan, a lot of the agency policies are concerning with what that looks like and we will make sure you have our e mail address if there is something you think your agency may want to try or you want a resource and connecting with CO who have tried it. The importance of what that looks like from our acquisition plan and our documentation, and our market research, it is just rightsizing our market research to our actual requirement and letting it inform our actual strategy.

We have another trivia, I think there is another acquisition trivia. What opportunities can you identify to streamline your acquisition planning? I would love to know. If there is something you could possibly identify. I see AI. Equipment purchase. Reaching out to other CO. Please do. Within the FAR Companion, you saw there is a reference of the oral acquisition plan and there is a lot of different items available. The periodic table, everything within the practitioner album talks through some of those things we can use to help streamline acquisition planning as well.

A quick summary here, RFL 1 really implements the new framework and tools. Lean in those tools and become familiar with them. We love your feedback as you looked through the FAR Companion and the buying guide, test some of the new RFO deviation, and really tailor your acquisition planning using market research strategically and leaning in the commercial first for streamlined flexibility and how industry, when we go to buy something, how we streamline certain purchases and we may spend a little time on other purchases, but we are rightsizing that. Just the collaboration is key.

It is a lot of information and a lot of change, but becoming familiar with the flexibility under RFO 12, 8, 16, there are so many flexibilities that may unpack your acquisition strategy. Depending on the FAR, there are some opportunities there.

DANIELLE MOUW: I will go quickly through this to make sure we get time to go through the questions. To close everything up and open it up for discussion, I hope it has been a great training so far. I enjoy hearing Monica remind us of how we can work smarter and not harder and that is what it is about. We have to spread awareness of the resources and make sure we are on the same page of the new RFO that is here. It will be coming and will replace the OG FAR shortly and we will all be using it. It is good to lean in and getting verse and what is available to you.

We are trying to bridge the gap to 20 new regulations and the cultural adoption piece with an applied learning lab and many agencies have these. We talked to our folks about any pain point in your workload being an opportunity to try to make it easier and less painful with a new flexibility from the RFO or using the Smart accelerator, which you learned about today.

If you are at GSA, e mail me or come talk with us. If you are not at GSA, you still have support, tremendous support with people like Monica and her team answering every day on the SAGtesting@gsa.gov and they are here to support you governmentwide. I will drop a link to the testing opportunities listing as this is a little knowledge hub we have come up with to make a one stop shop for all things from the acquisition.gov, that learning artifacts that are coming out of the teams like the sample or acquisition plan I shared with you today.

As we test and coach at the agency we put those in our tools and this is an idea for you all and other agencies that you can quickly scale best practices and encourage innovation by breaking down silos in this way. I am so happy to talk with you about this more, but I want to wrap it up with this slide that will be in the deck. Everything I have shared is here including I will start off at the top as there are questions about AI in the pod.

We have tools at GSA not everybody does, but there are incredible champions within SAS on the AI side of the house who are partnering with us to talk about AI and to talk about all of the change in acquisition and a way that empowers people to sandbox and play around with LLM or large learning language model safely in a compliant way.

If you use the ChatGPT, don’t put procurement assessment in there, just copy and paste the source RFO text when you have it do analysis because it is not trending on the latest RFO information and you have to feed it that to it. I absolutely recommend you play around and ask questions about it and do so in an ethical way. Remember you are in a government wide base.

We have a contact there and all of the great training resource. Monica highlighted the RFO foundations workshop. Come spend a day with us and learn about our echo acquisition planning and a deep dive.

FAR overhaul Q&A

Over to the Q&A, let me give you want to start. This is about discretion from Carl or Carol. As someone who has been in the space over 13 years I was under the impression that this was discretion across the board. Can you elaborate on the size of the agency that typically weren’t in a viewpoint to empower actions that are not explicitly barred?

MONICA TAYLOR: I always say we have our experience within the work agency, and just to kind of answer that quickly, one of the things that they are changing is culture. Culture couldn’t differ depending on the agency or the office. Sam agency structures have multiple agencies or components. With my DHS, I did a lot of coaching governmentwide. There are some agencies that lead to the empowerment to try something like an oral presentation or advisory down select. Some are hesitant. Not that it is not allowed, but it’s not really encouraged. This is an opportunity where it’s not necessarily the size of the agency, just depends on what the culture or appetite for risk management versus risk aversion.

You cannot avoid all risk, so sometimes what we think is common and our offices, it is not common and other offices. We start to see that and with the overhaul, this is where the FAR Council within the FAR Companion a novel of approaches that are still encouraged even if it is not in the FAR Companion, they encouraged the periodic table and it’s giving it that management that leadership push of let’s change the culture governmentwide.

DANIELLE MOUW: This question is from Kingson with the POC contact regarding your agency deviation and I will let Monica answer, and I will show you where you can see the memo to find that person.

MONICA TAYLOR: Depending, start with your policy lead. Depending on where you are within DOJ, if you are at headquarters or within a component or agency level, start with the policy team. I put a link in the chat to acquisition gateway to find that advocates and that person and sometimes link you to the policy lead and Danielle is showing the memo. Most of the memos are issued by the procurement executive or HCA. It is finding someone within that office that will be the point of contact, but you can start with your acquisition agent or lead policy within your organization.

DANIELLE MOUW: From Latoya, do we now just only reference our companion and solicitations instead of FAR, if the agency has issued deviation?

MONICA TAYLOR: You are not so much referencing that FAR Companion, but you are referencing the RFO. The model deviation. If it is RFO, 8.104, you are referencing that were referencing RFO 12.201 1. You are referencing the RFO part, and that does differ and your agency will have guidance on how you are to reference at that.

DANIELLE MOUW: From Neil, for our echo eight, is there a plan for awarding more single or other standardized products?

MONICA TAYLOR: I will let GSA lead answer that as I am not that federal supply team or any of the best-in-class vehicles team. As part of this overhaul, teams are looking at the opportunities to streamline. I will contact to the proper group.

Here’s the cleaned-up transcript for the next section, with indents removed, paragraph breaks added, and speaker names unbolded:

DANIELLE MOUW: There are other things mixed then as well. We are centralizing a lot of vehicles over the agency and that is an initiative. We are updating our completed vehicles to permit for and most are updated for those vehicles that is a new flexibility that has come out within the new RFO 16.

Let us know if that answers your question at a high level, if not, we can get you to the most updated folks. Andrea asks is a contracting professional who are impacted by the changes, how can we attract and provide inputs during the rulemaking process?

MONICA TAYLOR: Every agency, if you go to the website, acquisition.gov, there is a landing page and you can see the agencies representatives who are getting feedback as the rules are circulated to different agencies. Hopefully it is connecting with policy leads, and there will be public comments, but connecting with your policy leads is a great opportunity to inform and give feedback, but we will always take feedback at GSA.gov and we can definitely take that in consideration.

DANIELLE MOUW: Elizabeth as a great question about procedures and lessening damages as well. I don’t know if you have more on that or if we need more information from Elizabeth.

MONICA TAYLOR: It looks like something that is very specific, so that may be something that one of the things if we have any department award individuals or changes to your internal documents with the deviation, so I will defer that.

DANIELLE MOUW: The testing opportunities link is a document only accessible and Google sheets to GSA and we are working on an accessible version to put out there for everyone, stay tuned. Great question.

Will FAR 13.106(1)(b)(1) sole source action be discussed.

MONICA TAYLOR: I love how specific that is and I have not memorized what that’s maybe and if that is the deviated or the old codified, but I will say one of the things in the RFO is the former part 13 with the acquisition procedures has moved to part 12 and 13 right now is only for noncommercial items, but without pulling up the reference, we will not discuss that today, but feel free to send that if there something specific you have regarding that.

DANIELLE MOUW: Quickly, reach out. The LLM are okay, but as a best practice not paid any procurement if it is redacting specific names, but talk specifically about which LLM and what you are allowed to put in it. Send me a note of good.

Jeremy is talking about FAR Companion 10 further market research report is not required. That appears highly conflicted with other policies. If you can catch that, I just paraphrase it.

MONICA TAYLOR: We are close to time, please know that we are in the middle. We are in the regulations that are changing and agencies have to update to reflect that. There is a time of allowing the agencies to reflect the different recommendations that are in the FAR Companion.

KELLY WHITFIELD: Thank you so much. That was an excellent presentation. I really appreciate all of the information. Thank you so much, and awesome job, Danielle and Monica. Amazing job. A lot of good questions. A quick reminder as we will be capturing all of the questions from the Q&A pod and we can follow up with those later. If we did not answer your question, don’t worry, we are capturing it and we can follow up with that and post it on the website later.

Thank you so much.

Understanding updates to MAS ordering procedures

Our next session, it is time, I want to keep us moving, but our next session for SASE is understanding updates to MAS ordering procedures RFO 8/GSAR 538.71, and we will hear an overview of the regulatory changes implemented through RFO 8 and GSAR by 38.71 streamlining requirements and facing flexibility in enabling more acquisition focus solutions.

Michelle White and Steven Hutchinson will be our wonderful presenters for this session. Michelle White is a procurement analyst in the office of acquisition solutions development in the federal acquisition services. She has led acquisition and operations with major programs including federal, AIX, USA access and supports technology innovation and federal acquisition.

She holds degrees and certificates from George Washington University, Miami University and NC State along with multiple fact certifications.

Steven currently serves as the head of the multiple award schedule mass policy division within the Office of Policy and Compliance OPC. Within the federal acquisition service, Steven is responsible for acquisition policy for one of the largest governmentwide contracts, the GSA multiple award schedule.

With that, I have done my introduction here and I don’t want to take anymore of your time and I went to move in the presentation. Steven and Michelle, thank you so much for joining us and I will pass it over to you.

MICHELLE WHITE: Thank you so much. Hello, everyone and welcome to our updates on MAS ordering procedures. Today, we will be hearing from Steve and I and we will look forward to talking about the key changes to the supply schedule and the multiple work order and procedures.

Let’s take a look at what we will be covering today our agenda is packed with key updates to that MAS ordering procedures starting with a brief introduction to the changes following by an overview of the key communication and training resources available to you for MAS and provide a brief overview of the requests of quotes and award process is.

The discussion is around the key changes including updates to the quote and that evaluation process, changes to blanket processes, removal of market items and we will shift to the materials and we will talk about the contracts after the Federal supply schedule or the schedule ordering procedures have a new home. The FAR part eight moved to the General services acquisition regulations or the GSAR. The overhaul 8.401B states when placing orders under MAS agencies must follow the procedures established and found at 53871.

These procedures are a complete rewrite of the ordering procedures designed to simplify streamlined to acquisition process. The key objectives were to remove unnecessary complexities and duplications that often slow down the ordering process. Also to embrace flexibility, innovation allowing agencies and contractors more adaptable options for unique needs. It eliminated duplicate tips FAR part eight on guidance and administration particularly for payment and order placement, disputes and terminations.

Instead of repeating the details, the updated procedures leverages the terms and conditions established in the actual contract terms making the process more efficient and consistent.

To support you in successfully ordering under the MAS program and helping with all of these changes, here are some great resources and ways to stay engaged. You can access the MAS ordering tips @ GSA.gov/MAS where you will find information on the policies and resources. You can stay informed, monitor the GSA MAS Internet channel or announcement updates and clarifications. To build the ordering expertise, take advantage of our ordering training and focus on the specific topics and you can also watch the on demand YouTube videos organized by topic for flexibility just in time learning.

We also want your help improving the tools and resources. Please share your feedback on existing content, training and guidance and let us know how to apply the new procedures. Examples, templates or checklists. If you have any questions, suggestions or feedback, reach out to us and our e mail at maspmo@gsa.gov.

This slide covers the basic procedures for soliciting request for quotes or RFQ and you can see that is identified in 538.7103.

First and foremost, use and RFQ. List all quotations for contractors. The specific requirements for the RFQ query based on the dollar value for purchases, agencies can place the order with any scheduled contractor that can meet the need and formal solicitation is not required. When that value is above the MICRA purchase threshold and below the simplify threshold, agencies should issue a written RFQ. If the requirement is included as a fixed price offering under MAS, contracting officers may serve a three or more scheduled through the GSA advantage or contractor catalogs and if an agency intends to make a sole source award, written justification is required.

Acquisitions above, simplify the threshold, agencies must issue a written RFQ and there is written justification. In these cases, contracting officer should solicit quotes from as many scheduled contractors as practicable with the goal of receiving at least three responses to support competition.

Overall the intent of the procedures is to promote fair opportunity, encourage competition and ensure agencies have the best value when ordering through MAS.

These are the key steps and compliance requirements for ordering under MAS. First, award of the contractor removed giving best value and the focus is on value as described in FAR 2.101.

Document the file to show their consideration ensuring transparency and is vital for readiness. Check Sam.gov for exclusion before the award and this is a mandatory compliance step and follow our echo four, seven, 10 and 11 for guidance on administration planning, market research and requirements definition.

Finally, provide a brief explanation to unsuccessful closures if requested within three days.

The new ordering procedures make this point very clear. FAR like part 15 process eliminated, scoring quotations, no establishing competitive ranges, at the same time, the procedures encourage agencies to be more innovative with their quote and their approaches giving them flexibility to increase efficiency. Another important change is the emphasis on best value. Agencies are directed to award the order blanket purchase agreement to the contractor that has the best value as defined and 2.101 and the lowest cost alternative language has been removed. This reinforces the focus on value and not just the price. Finally, procedures streamline ordering by eliminating old separate processes or supplies and services that require a statement of work.

This cuts down unnecessary complexity and makes the ordering process more straightforward for agencies and contractors.

Here is a quick overview of the key blanket purchase agreement requirements and agency should keep this in mind. This includes what stays the same and what has been streamlined. BPA spell out the details, scope, ordering., delivering terms, discounts, who has the authority to order and any limitations on ordering. This creates a greater clarity and consistency across this. Agencies conduct the review to make sure this represents the best value, check for discount opportunities and verify the order and procedures are being followed.

It also allows you to confirm the underlying contract is still valid. Finally, one of the most notable changes is elimination of the requirement for the head of contracts and activities or HCA to approve all single BPA over $100 million. This streamlines the process reducing unnecessary administrative delays while still maintaining safeguards for competition and value.

One of the major updates to the ordering procedures is complete removal of open market item guidance. Agencies are directed to use materials to build complete solution. This should be used to the max extent practicable to have total solutions while remaining compliant with procurement requirements such as supply chain or the trade act agreements that are under this station.

I will now turn it over to my colleague, Steven, to cover OLM.

Deep dive on MAS flexibilities

STEVEN HUTCHINSON: Thank you. I will let Michelle take a break and turn it back to Michelle in a moment and it will be a super hot one today in DC so I hope you are staying cool. I will now jump in to the ordered level materials. One of the major changes in the RFL for MAS was OLM. What is OLM? They are supplies or services that were not known at the time of the MAS contract award, but are necessary at the order level cockup think of them as items needed to complete the solution. They can be added at this delivery order level has long as they are not the primary purpose of the order.

There is no longer a limit on the percentage of the order value for OLM.

Policy requirements. Order level materials were designed to cover certain supplies and services not known at the time of contract awards. They are now permitted on all order prices whether fixed price, time and materials or labor hours. What this means in practice is ordering activities are no longer restricted to just one contract type when using OLM.

Instead, they can have a structure best fitting their acquisition and this expansion greatly increases flexibility and usefulness of OLM. Ordering activities cover a much broader range of the center of MAS orders streamlining acquisition, avoiding unnecessary procurements and ensures that government has access to exactly what it needs at the order level.

OLM must still be clearly identified in the order in ordering contracting officers must follow GSAR 538.71 ordering procedures including using the overall FAR 15.4 for all OLM fair and reasonable.

Pricing is not set, it is determined at the order level. Let’s talk about benefits of OLM. OLM gives ordering activities greater flexibility by covering any supply or services needed to support the primary requirement and less prohibited under MAS including items such as ancillary supplies or services and solutions specific components. By allowing complete mission focused solutions under a single order, OLM reduces administrative burden, enhances competition, drugs cost savings and maintains compliance with MAS requirements including supply chain risk reviews and trade act compliance.

What are the best actresses utilizing OLM? The four activities, define the requirements at the order or BPA level and to use OLM, contractors must hold this on this contract and utilize OLM as necessary and encourage identifying these as a separate contract line item in the quote. Ordering agency must determine pricing to be fair and reasonable and established by the ordering activity.

The competition rules under GSAR 538.7103 ordering procedures apply to all orders including OLM. Let’s talk about OLM and BPA for a moment. These materials can be included in these orders as long as the MAS contract includes the OLM and the OLM is within the scope of the BPA. Again, they can become the primary purpose of the BPA, but they provide flexibility for ancillary requirements that support the solution.

Let’s talk about the evaluation checklist we have provided. We have included an order level materials evaluation checklist to serve as a practical tool for ordering activities to make sure all OLM requirements are applied before. Is the order being placed against an authorized MAS contract? Has a contractor added the OLM SIN to their MAS contract? Is the order or BPA structure said that OLM are not the preponderance of the work? If used, are indirect handling costs apply correctly? Has the ordering activity remain fair and reasonable? GSA has not done the fair and reasonable price determination at the contract level, it has been moved to the order level.

Now let’s take a moment and have a polling question. When is it appropriate to use OLM on a task or delivery order? I will give everyone a couple of moments to think about that. We will then move to the next slide.

MICHELLE WHITE: I did just launch that, so we will have a little bit of time to answer it. We have when is it appropriate to use OLM on a task or delivery order? You can select all that apply. When they are necessary to support the overall solution and are not the primary purpose of the order? When the contractor proposes open market items that were not known at the time of the schedule award? When the total value of OLM exceeds 50% of the order value or when the ordering activity determines the items can be reasonably completed and priced at the order level?

We will give people just a moment. The answers are coming in. They are still coming in pretty quickly, so we will do one more second. Hopefully everyone has had a chance to answer this. I will go ahead end this and share the results the majority of people said when they OLM is necessary to support the overall solution and the primary purpose of the order.

People also said when the ordering activity determines items to be reasonably completed and price of the order level.

We had a lot of A, B and D. I will pass it back over.

STEVEN HUTCHINSON: Thank you, Michelle.

I will not do a sound effects, but when can OLM be utilized? All of these answers, we encourage the use by the massive vendors to encourage competition and must evaluate all in a quote endless they are specifically prohibited in the RFQ. There is some confusion about the 50% and OLM cannot be the primary purpose, they can be over 50%, they cannot be the entire amount. Think about it that way. We have more guidance on the FAQ that are attached to the GSA.gov website.

Contractor use of government sources, this is an important and powerful new flexibility on MAS. What is this? This is the ability for the MAS contractor to meet in order requirement by obtaining products or services from another scheduled contract or government supply source. How does it work? MAS contractors can utilize the new flexibility in responding to RFQ. Why is it important? A big issue has been ODC or other direct costs and the contractor can respond to an RFQ by adding an item from another MAS contractor to provide a total solution and we will cover an example in an upcoming slide.

Contractor use of MAS contracts. What are the requirements? Again, the requirements are basically the simplest thing to say for a contractor when buying from another contractor is a need to follow the same requirements that you as a government ordering contract officer would follow and that is the easiest way to describe what the requirements are. For that contractor, they must maintain the competition documents and basically documents for audit are things that must be maintained.

Let’s talk about this scenario. The MAS contractors come from another MAS contract achieve the best solution. An agency has an RFQ for IT modernization services and part of this requirement includes the need for monitoring software and hardware. The problem, what if many IT MAS contractors do not have the software or hardware on the MAS contract? With the RFL, any IT MAS contractor who could provide that modernization services can simply purchase the software and hardware from another MAS hardware or software vendor and include it in the solution.

This increases competition and if it is purchased off a scheduled contract it is vetted and is compliance and meets the contract.

How do you evaluate the pricing of the software? The massive vendor simply cites the contract number where the software and hardware was obtained and the MAS schedule and price that they pay for. All prices have already been determined at the contract level so you can rely on the price, and you can always ask for additional discounts.

Can the MAS vendor apply handling fees to the item? Yes. As the ordering contracting officer, you must determine that the handling fee is fair and reasonable, and we suggest you put in the RFQ that the vendor separately separates this fee and their quote as a separate line item to be evaluated and considered.

Time for another polling question. Can we use the procedures right away? I am sure that is a question many people ask.

KELLY WHITFIELD: I have launched that old question and hopefully everyone sees it up on your screen. Can we use the new MAS procedure right away?
No, you need to wait until the final FAR rules are posted?
Most likely you will need to verify the agency has already issued the deviation for FAR 8.

People are answering, and a lot of answers coming in. I see over half of you have answered, it is still going up. If you don’t see a poll, you may have to enable pop ups. I see in the chat that some do not see the poll. If you want to write the answer in the chat, you can, but it is okay.

Things are slowing down and I will go ahead in this whole. Most of you said most likely you will need to verify the agency has already issued the deviation for FAR eight. Is that correct?

STEVEN HUTCHINSON: Yes, I did not get a chance to do the drumroll. 89% of the people, good job on that.

On this slide, this is an important slide as it refers to the poll, and this is where you go to see if your agency has issued a deviation allowing you to utilize the new ordering procedure. When we did the DEC, there are 25 agencies issuing the deviation.

To find this information, go to acquisition.gov, FAR overhaul and then you will see a list of agencies and deviations as of last Friday there was 29. We are getting more coming in. Remember to review the deviation for any agency specific guidance. I thought I saw a question earlier about that, we have the FAR procedures, but the agency may have additional procedures and that goes with included deviation.

Let me turn it back to Michelle to finish things up.

MICHELLE WHITE: Thank you, Steve. We encourage you to take advantage of the new and the retained flexibilities and tools available under MAS and we continue to have that contractor agents or CTA allowing for two or more MAS contractors to provide a total solution with each contractor remaining as a prime contractor for the work and Estevan mentioned, the materials are a powerful tool increasing flexibility, it reduces administrative burden and eliminates the need for contracts duplicates and as Steven talked about, purchasing from MAS contracts is another powerful tools.

Remember to use these tools for efficiency with a governmentwide purchasing card and online ordering through GSA advantage.

You can stick around for the next session and a deep dive in the MAS order flexibilities where Jeff and Dana will go in more detail on these flexibilities.

Here are some key resources for finding out more information about the changes support MAS. The fourth bullet, the flexibilities website has a lot M information we have gone over today, and we encourage you to visit these resources. This slide has some contact information for us and if you have any questions after the training, feel free to reach out to us with any questions that are e mailed at maspmo@gsa.gov.

Thank you for the session today. We are ready to start looking at your questions and answering those.

I will go down and see if I can start when the questions were coming in.

KELLY WHITFIELD: Yes, thank you. Sorry about that, I was muted for a moment. Thank you, everyone. Do not forget as that was great information and we appreciated. If you have a question, please put it in the Q&A for us. Let’s go ahead and look at that.

MICHELLE WHITE: Seven, this is a great question for you. Amy is asking, does this GSAR supersede local regulations?

STEVEN HUTCHINSON: Way I see it, if you are using a schedule now, yes, use the procedures, but in addition there are some additional agency procedures to and we consider the supplementary. It is in addition to. The Department of War, DOD has additional fair and reasonable requirements at the task order level, and you utilize that procedure and is the Department of War procedures and they should not conflict.

Long story short, they are supplementary to the GSAR ordering procedures.

MICHELLE WHITE: If you add an item at the order level, are you then able to raise that up to the BPA?

STEVEN HUTCHINSON: The order level and BPA are basically the same comment there is the contract level where we award this agile contract and the order level or BPA level. Basically, I think we covered this in the presentation, but I encourage everyone to go to the FAQs that are linked on the GSA.gov page and look under MAS order flexibilities and what we say about BPA is it is important that when the BPA was issued, they are within the scope and as long as it is within the scope when it was awarded, then yes, you can utilize that.

MICHELLE WHITE: Here is a long one. I do not see designated authority score so source justifications exceeding the SAT comment GSA M538.7104 3(a) specifies that the ordering activity Seo must determine in writing that the circumstances of the acquisition names only one source reasonably capable of providing the products, services or solutions for orders that do not exceed SAT, the 538.7104 3(b) is silent regarding acquisitions exceeding the SAT. Is this correct or are the approval authorities to find somewhere else?

STEVEN HUTCHINSON: My thought on that one is that is one where it is silent, but you would rely on your agency or internal agency regulations for those approval levels.

MICHELLE WHITE: There is a question from Shawna. Why do MAS not match those on other websites like Sam.gov as it makes it difficult when doing market research and ordering on GSA.

JEFF CALHOUN: The item numbers look similar to those, they are a little different and that they are unique and you could have multiple special item numbers that have subsets of that NAICS. We did have the consolidation to align more with NAICS, but they are a little more granular and that you can have multiple ones that are aligned to the name NAICS.

MICHELLE WHITE: Thank you. I appreciate that. Here is a question, will this be discussing the new overhaul of the BPA on a GWAC? There is little available information? There is none, but I will put a link to that question that provides some guidance on it for one of the other contracts. Afraid to check that out.

Another question on contracting, how did they go about doing GSA advantage login allowing only two options, federal or state and local. The federal selection opening them up to all products is limited because it only allows through a GSA smart pay card. Our vendors are not approved for a smart pay card. How did they go about purchasing through GSA?

STEVEN HUTCHINSON: These are contractors purchasing from another contract and providing that product, going back to the government example. I don’t think it is a vision the contractors would use advantage and your E tools to facilitate the transactions. The idea is it is done by the contractor to be other contractor. I think as a government ordering contractor officer would not need to be involved in that and is something the contractor should do on their own and provide the product and documentation as we said.

MICHELLE WHITE: Practical purposes, is there an example or sample template RFQ showing how OLM instructions should be organized or written in an RFQ?

STEVEN HUTCHINSON: That is great feedback and I don’t think we have gotten there at this time. That is get feedback and something we will work on for future trainings.

MICHELLE WHITE: There is a question, please confirm if we include the OLM SIN, a contractor cannot only respond by quoting items via the OLM SIN.

STEVEN HUTCHINSON: The OLM SIN, it is to provide maximum flexibility to the vendors and provide maximum competition and choice to you as the ordering contract. Because the OLM SIN is there, they don’t have to, it is up to the vendor and offer the best solution to the government and for the ordering officer to do that.

MICHELLE WHITE: Question about GSAR 538.71 not known at the time, but in the training, to state it is not known at the time of the MAS contract only. Can you provide clarification?

STEVEN HUTCHINSON: Basically, the way we look at OLM, the vendor, we encourage them to add the item if they know through the MAS contract and they don’t have to. The idea is, long story short, it does not it is not on the MAS contract. If it is priced out on the MAS contract, it is not OLM an infinite is priced out on the MAS contract, it is a contract Item. Basically, I don’t know if there is a lot of distinction, but some vendors have been on the contract and some will not.

KELLY WHITFIELD: Okay. Thank you. We still have some time, so if you see any questions, just jump in and let me know, otherwise I can pull out a couple for us. We have a question from Theodore asking as it was stated purchasing from other GSA contractors, cut a contractor also use LLM to purchase from their own MAS catalog like if it BPA ordered an item in question, the item in question is not awarded at the level and is on the MAS catalog and a scope determination shows it would fit within the scope of the order.

STEVEN HUTCHINSON: Yes. If it is on their contract, they would not need to purchase it for themselves and they could offer it to the government customer. Again, think about it APA is just an agreement and not contracts as long as the item is within the scope of the BPA, then I would say they can do that. As the ordering contract officer, you would have to determine the pricing of the item sometimes when there is pricing add a level that is lower than the scheduled price, it may impact it.

KELLY WHITFIELD: Thank you.

MICHELLE WHITE: Another question, while an (inaudible) be a noncommercial item?

STEVEN HUTCHINSON: We covered this in the FAQ and the answer is no. All items purchased through MAS have to be commercial including OLM.

MICHELLE WHITE: They follow question, when can OLM be added to a BPA order?

STEVEN HUTCHINSON: The OLM would have to have been within the scope of the BPA at the time that it was issued, so it is a scope issue. If the OLM is on the contractors and the BPA contract, if it is within scope, then yes.

MICHELLE WHITE: Do I need to inform a contractor that they can propose OLM in response to the RFQ.

STEVEN HUTCHINSON: This is a great question. I forgot to mention in the presentation, no, you do not need to do this. What you need to do is the opposite and we encourage you not to do this, but if you don’t want to evaluate the OLM, that that in your RFQ. We encourage you to have the OLM and have more sources and you will have more sources to bid on the RFQ. Long story short, the guidance is you don’t need to say anything, they submit the OLM and they need to be considered.

MICHELLE WHITE: Are OLM available across all MAS contracts?

STEVEN HUTCHINSON: As of refresh 31 that we did two weeks ago, we have opened the scope to the entire contract and will take a little bit of time for the MAS contractor who do not have the OLM to add that. In the interim, the best policy advice or guidance is when putting out an RFQ, obviously remind the vendors they need to have the OLM and that is something you should check as we mentioned in the presentation when evaluating that.

MICHELLE WHITE: Do OLM has to comply with SCRIM requirements?

STEVEN HUTCHINSON: Yes. I think we covered this in the presentation, but OLM basically, the best way to think about it is these are items that are added at the order level and not the other lateral. They need to comply with all of the conditions including SCRIM.

MICHELLE WHITE: A question that does the RFQ need to state we reserve the right to include an OLM line item when awarding a FAS the order.

STEVEN HUTCHINSON: No, if you are, then OLM is acceptable for the vendors to quote and for you as the ordering contract to evaluate this.

MICHELLE WHITE: Clarification question, confirm if we include the OLM SIN a contractor cannot only respond by quoting items via OLM SIN.

STEVEN HUTCHINSON: It is up to the contractor, and we encourage the contractors for the ease of the ordering contractor officers to include as many items as they can to make your life easier, but they do not need to quote all of those comments the option of the vendor.

MICHELLE WHITE: A great question, can one contractor refused to sell an OLM to another competitive contractor?

STEVEN HUTCHINSON: Michelle has read the FAQ. That is another point we have included in the FAQ and the answer is yes. A vendor can reject in order from another contractor, they have that option Julio six another question to clarify the industrial funding, can you talk more about how that is tied with contractor use?

STEVEN HUTCHINSON: The industrial less than 1% needs to be included on all items including OLM, it is embedded in the pricing at the contract level, it is also the contractors required to pass that along and include that in the OLM pricing. For contractors, when they purchase the item. If I am a contractor and I’m purchasing from another MAS contractor, since the item is already on the contractor purchasing the GSA contract, the IFF is included in that price. When that contractor providing the quote to you as the ordering contracting officer, the price they have paid or gotten from the other GSA contractors should include that. We do not want to double counting, and they do not need to include that when they submit their quote to the government as it is already included in the contractor who they bought it from.

MICHELLE WHITE: A question on travel, is travel considered an OLM.

STEVEN HUTCHINSON: Another plug for the FAQ, travel is treated separately for the parts of the GSA schedule to contract talking about travel, travel is treated as a reimbursable contract Item, so again, take a look at the FAQs and they talk about travel, but the answer is no.

MICHELLE WHITE: A few follow up questions about the ability for contractors to refuse an order. The first one is as a vendor can refuse an order from another vendor, would it be considered a best practice to require the secondary vendor to provide proof of a business to business agreement between the source at vendor and the purchasing vendor?

STEVEN HUTCHINSON: This is my thoughts. I don’t want to step on the ordering contracting officer’s purview, that I would say that is probably not necessary. The way I think about it is this ability is to help the contractors provide the best lowest cost solution compliant to the government. It’s really, to make a long story short, you should fit up requirements and it’s up to them how they want to come to you and meet the requirement.

I would say that is not necessary. You should encourage it because the government pricing is lower, and if you buy it from another scheduled vendor, you know it meets all of the schedule terms and conditions and is easier for the vendor and it is a win/win for everyone.

Long story short, do not get in the middle of that, just let the vendors figure that out and provide the best solution as ordering contract officer.

MICHELLE WHITE: Question about, is this available to MAS contractors?

STEVEN HUTCHINSON: That is a great example. GSA has gotten great discounts from some of our big software OEM and resellers, so definitely that is a great example of encouraging in the RFQ it purchasing within the scope of one go for the vendors to go ahead and maximize the discounts and pass those along to the government.

On the FAQ there is a link to the OneGov sites as well that links to that as well. You can put if it is within the scope, we encourage you to utilize one of and here is that link. Hopefully they will make that happen and their solution for the ordering contract.

MICHELLE WHITE: There is a great question, non IT service providers on MAS, are they able to purchase necessary software tools?

STEVEN HUTCHINSON: Yes. It is within the scope of commercial services, so it is not limited, they can purchase yes is the answer. I will keep it short.

MICHELLE WHITE: OLM and whether or not the items purchased from another MAS contractor count toward the OLM limitation or primary purpose rule?

STEVEN HUTCHINSON: That is a great question, and we have that on the FAQs and address the same question. The current position is no it doesn’t because our thoughts is since the item is on another MAS casual contract, it is not that item. That is what is on the FAQ.

MICHELLE WHITE: This is kind of a follow up question to something we discussed earlier. Are the new MAS ordering procedures mandatory and do you have to use them?

STEVEN HUTCHINSON: Yes.

MICHELLE WHITE: Easy enough. We have a couple minutes for a few more questions if anyone has any. If not we can give you a little break before the next session starts.

KELLY WHITFIELD: Yes. If we want to wrap up, we definitely can. I went to say thank you to both Michelle and Steve as this has been great information. Really wonderful.

Again, we will capture all of the Q&A and follow up and post it online. Thank you to everyone. Any final comments or thoughts Steven or Michelle?

STEVEN HUTCHINSON: No, thank you for the opportunity and we appreciate all of the agency partners.

KELLY WHITFIELD: Thank you both. I am going to add a link in the chat for everyone. This is a quick survey we have made. It is very short, but I will be sharing the link at the end of every session in the chat. Feel free to go there and if you want to provide us with feedback on each of the sessions. We would very much appreciated.

With that, we can take a short break for five minutes. Everyone, take a quick break, grab some water, be back by 11:00 a.m. Eastern time. Thank you so much to Steve and Michelle.

(Break).

KELLY WHITFIELD: It is 11:00 a.m., so hopefully people are back. I do not want to delay, so let’s go ahead and jump in. Thank you, everyone. Hopefully, you got to go get water or whatever you need across campus our next session today has a deep dive on MAS flexibilities. We will hear a deep explanation as it MAS flexibilities within the ordering procedures including enhanced order level materials and authorities. Use of MAS contractor arrangements are the arrangement for MAS contractors to procure from other MAS contracts to deliver comprehensive, total solution offerings.

This is a nice tie in the last session you just had. We will get a little more detail here and find out some more information on that.

Without further ado, I will go ahead and pass it over to our excellent presenters. Jeff and Dana, thank you so much for joining us. I will pass it over to you.

DANA ROSA: Hello and good morning, everyone. Welcome back from the break.

As a reminder before we get started, we want to ask you submit your questions to the queue and Acer we are capturing them and if we don’t get to all of the questions, as Kelly pointed out several times, there will be a response for the Q&A.

Welcome to today’s deep dive in GSA MAS order flexibilities. I am Dana Rosa, I am the management office joined by my supervisor, Jeff Calhoun who is the MAS contracting officer. This is our screenshot. I will get right in it for the agenda.

The agenda for this session will cover a MAS program refresher. We will talk on the RFQ flexibilities. We will take a deep dive in the order level materials or OLM and MAS contractor team arrangements for MAS CTA, we will talk about contractor use and then we will and cover key takeaways.

In this section, we will revisit the foundation elements of the multiple work schedule we will cover what the MAS program, how it is structured, why it remains an acquisition vehicle for federal agencies.

The multiple award schedule is a governmentwide contract vehicle allowing federal agencies to quickly buy commercial products and services at pre negotiated terms through a flexible streamlined process. Key elements we want to point out of the MAS program is the ordering activity defining requirements, evaluating the quotes and determines the best value. MAS contract quotes products and services within the terms of the MAS contracts. MAS ordering procedures are found in RFO part 8 and GSAR 538.71 and we also have content on GSA.gov flexibility within the MAS framework.

The key concept is the streamlined ordering process under that program and orders enables flexibility while maintaining compliance with federal acquisition requirements.

What does this allow for ordering activities to do? You can tell a requirement at the order level, seek innovative and complete solutions, leverage contractor expertise and competition. Also reduce administrative burdens and compare it to the FAR part 15 procurements. The process that requires you for fair opportunity, you also need to make the best value determination as well as provide proper documentation.

Why order flexibility matters. The benefits of the multiple work schedule is the flexibility that it provides at the order level two meets complex or evolving requirements. The flexibilities are crucial because they allow ordering activities to procure complete solutions. As stated previously agencies can tailor solutions to their specific needs and ensuring they acquire a fully integrated end to end solution rather than meeting multiple contracts.

It reduces procurement lead time. By offering a streamlined and adaptable approach compared to more formal procurement methods, the program accelerates the acquisition process. Leverage innovative solutions. The ability to tailor requirements and adapt to mission needs without starting a new procurement from scratch encourages contractors to offer more innovative approaches and complete solutions.

Again, promote best value. By increasing competition allowing for the tailored requirements, the program helps agencies effectively source the best overall value for their needs.

It is important to remember this flexibility requires proper use and documentation to maintain compliance.

RFQ scope flexibilities.

We are going to explore how ordering contract officers can effectively and appropriately apply flexibility when developing requests for quotations or RFQ’s and or the MAS program. Defining the RFQ scope within the MAS infrastructure, the MAS program includes 12 large categories, which is broken down in 78 subcategories including 277 special item numbers or SIN. We want to highlight similar products and services can exist under multiple SIN, and we do allow for identical numbers under multiple SIN.

Key principle we want to point out is that the scope of an RFQ under the multiple award schedule program is the entire MAS solicitation. Not to special item numbers or SIN selected. Key principles for ordering activities. Broad scope is default. RFQ are open to all SIN unless the ordering activity explicitly restricts them in the RFQ document. SIN selection comments selecting specific ones may limit visibility of the RFQ to contractors, but does not inherently restrict the scope of SIN that contractors can use to quote as long as they are awarded those on the contract.

As a best practice, ordering activities should avoid unnecessarily restricting to promote competition and flexibility.

Limiting SIN is appropriate when technically or mission justified such as when requirements are highly technical and tied to specific qualifications and as an example, we will go in a couple of scenarios in the next life, but those requiring the compliance.

Also linked that reinforces this principle was a GAO precedent that is linked in the slide with clarification that the scope must be explicitly limited if intended.

In this scenario, an agency is procuring cloud hosting and infrastructure services with specific security, compliance and performance requirements that are aligned to a designated cloud SIN. This requirement depends on the specific technical qualifications such as cloud certifications, industry standards and capabilities, not all include vendors that can meet these needs. As a result, the ordering activity appropriated limited with the RFQ to the relevant cloud, and this ensures all vendors responding are qualified and capable of meeting the agency’s technical and compliance requirements.

More importantly, the competition is still maintained, but within a properly defined vendor that is equipped to deliver required services.

The key take away is when requirements are highly technical and directly tied to this qualification, limiting the scope is not only appropriate, but necessary to ensure mission success. Scenario two, when an agency has a broad solution-based needs such as outfitting an office space with furniture and related services, this is not limiting to a specific SIN, but this is where it would add some value.

In this scenario, an agency as outfitting an office with desk chairs and installation services may fall under overlapping SIN. The ancillary equipment and installation services are under multiple overlapping and by not restricting this requirement, contractors can compose a complete end to end solution using any award on their contract.

The value this brings is the approach enables vendors to bundle products and services resulting in a more comprehensive quote and increase competition and overall value.

In this scenario, the bottom line is limiting the scope should be the exception and not the default for flexibility of the program.

I will pass it over to Jeff who will cover other MAS flexibilities.

JEFF CALHOUN: Thank you, Dana. Good morning, everyone. I am Jeff Calhoun, MAS contracting officer or the MAS solicitation. I want to point out things are moving fast. The RFO, acquisition related, that is the case, we are trying to get valuable training materials out there and we are getting a lot of good things out there. This is the first time we have presented this presentation, so whether in the Q&A or the MAS.gov, comments from the previous sessions as a pull deep dive in the full session would be great on OLM.

We are trying to get that session out, so we want to be responsive to what you see and what areas you feel we can do better.

Hopefully, this is valuable as it is intended to what Michelle talked about and getting in more scenarios. Curious to hear your feedback as we go through.

We talked a lot about the OLM and supplies and services added at the order level, incidental, not the primary purchaser of the order, allowed on all order types. They must have the SIN and the vast majority have the refresh, starting last week the remaining vendors should be getting this and everyone virtually should have this in the near future.

They must be identified in the order by the contractor and the ordering activities must follow those. The burden is on the order of the activities and the authorities listed, so a lot of what was talked about previously.

When to use them. Use them to acquire incidental items or services needed to support the overall folder and for the MAS SIN not for standalone requirements. Appropriate when the requirements cannot be met by the contracting Item and they really do help enable complete solutions. Common examples are supporting services, direct costs items necessary.

A couple of best actresses and pitfalls, speaking to the quoting contractors, encourage them to support the need and getting supporting documentation because the burden is on the ordering activity to determine the price to be fair and reasonable and ensuring that you document the price analysis.

Areas where the pitfalls fails to clearly identify, if you are not aware you need to perform the extra step for determining the price is fair and reasonable. If they are not required or you have the vendors incorrectly with the standard MAS items and they are determine fair and reasonable, but you need to see those completely independent and you can perform that determination.

Overly restrictive requirements limiting OLM. Nothing else comes out of this session, what we say here is you don’t have to define the flexibilities the vendors use or point them down a path one or the other, but be open to the flexibilities. There will be instances where you want to limit the scope, but there is not a need to limit flexibility, we encourage you to promote the flexibility by the quoting contractor.

We have an example scenario. This requires complex instructor led cybersecurity training with short term software licenses and classified exercise materials. The outcome is the customer understands the requirements are unique and their silence or they encourage the OLM. We give three examples including the MAS contract items, some items with the 875, all OLM items. He questions and we will get in some answers. Trying to be as interactive as possible, I know we are trying to be interactive and engaging. We will talk about the answers on the next slides. Is the customer obligated since those are all contract items? Can it include up to 50% of the order?

Is quote three eligible and must the customer award a quote if the lowest price and is acceptable? I encourage you to consider those and you can give me a thumbs up if you had it correct in your mind. Are you obligated with all contract items? No because you allow the OLM to allow flexibility. We discourage you. There is some thumbs up. If anyone wants to call themselves out, I appreciate integrity. Can this include 50% of the order of an OLM? Yes. It is not just the primary. No more than 33%. It is now the primary purpose and is very different in terms of the proportion of the order. Is quote three eligible for an award? They quote all OLM and they cannot be the primary purpose of the order and would be likely be eligible.

Must awards based on the lowest price be acceptable? No, this talked about under the new RFO procedures, we encourage you to select best value and be open minded and don’t just focus on price alone. Assume you select quote two is the best value. Some ancillary items, some MAS contract and they are presumably applicable line and they call out everything specifically and it looks great like they follow all procedures. Would you still award if the portion was 51% of the total price? Possibly. It is not a percentage test. FAQs get in the ordering activities discretion to determine what is meant by primary purpose.

What if price analysis shows the OLM was clearly overpriced? You must determine they are fair and reasonable.

What if quote two charged and OLM handling fee, would you still consider awarding them? Did you look at that fee and determine it was fair and reasonable? They are allowed, but you must look at them.

MAS CTA, it is an agreement between two MAS contractors to jointly meet an agency requirement allowing them to combine capabilities and deliver total solution, typically a structure this is strictly the structure each contractor must have a separate MAS contractor and each responsible for their portion of the work. Typically, what we see you will have a massively and members and you can have 10, 15 or 20 Teams at makes the primary lead all that more important because the last bullet is not a prime relationship and they all have privy to the government and the CTA arrangements if poorly structured is not a great value to the ordering activity if no clearly and they’re not bringing the value of managing the team.  If you have different orders and e mails, that is probably not good.

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Contractors team together, define the rules in the agreement and basic requirements of the CTA agreement. There is much more detail for this, and we have another dedicated training session that should be out soon, but it should include role and responsibilities of task ownership, pricing. What will they provide? What is the proportion of the order? What is the invoicing and payment structure looking like? You have a lead that will take on the product management and what is the order and procedure and duration?

For execution, it is a single quote and all members perform and report independently. Best practice, you need a strong CTA for them to be of value to the ordering activity.

He benefits, access to larger opportunities; you allow these vendors to compete for complex work and they are feasible. You allow them to combine specialized expertise, encouraging vendors not to get outside of their lanes and focus on their specialty and team with someone who is good at their specialty.

You can tailor to unique agency needs. We have talked to vendors about networking, meeting partners, I always see RFQ and I don’t have 25%. Go find a partner and encourage CTA. We have seen groups who establish relationships with a veteran-owned company that has complimentary things like carpeting, furniture, design services, and the types of things that are commonly procured together. You have prepackaged MAS CTA Teams that could be eligible for veteran-owned set asides. We see that coordination prior to RFQ where they have a Rolodex established to be responsive to those.

We think it encourages more competitive puzzles.

Same format, and we will have some key questions and then let you tell me if you got the right answer. Customer requires cybersecurity and network and restructure nervousness. They are packaged and require specialized experience. The outcome: customer recognizes and encourages CTA to maximize and quote one includes all MAS items. One single vendor. Quote two is a mess CTA, partners, well-structured plan, a lead, 875. Next is MAS CTA with multiple partners, poorly structured, notably and looks like it may be a mess. Are you obligated to work with quote one since they don’t have a CTA? Must you award to quote number three as lowest price acceptable, and can you award to any of the three based on value? Has the chat pops up, it goes over the slide, and I have hit that X button like four times.

The quotes are listed at the top. Go ahead, Dana. This one you may have already guessed and was a little rejectable. You are not obligated. You are allowed flexibility. They are there by default, and whether you explicitly say I would love for you to team if appropriate, go to GSA.gov and follow the rules, or if you are silent they can bring that to the quote.

Must award quote three as the lowest price? We are getting predictable, but best value. You have the flexibility when appropriate, look for the price.

Can you award to any of the three based on value? Yes, customer associate, this may not be the only value, and we are looking at the CTA, but quote one, there is no CTA at all, and that is pretty easy as you don’t have to deal with CTA lead and teaming partners. Quote two, you have a well-structured CTA and may be clean and easy to deal with, but is it worth saving $25,000? What three, poorly structured CTA, but lowest price. Is it worth 50,000 if you are spending X amount of man-hours coordinating with the folks on the team answering all the phone calls?

Other considerations: does the MAS CTA make coordination easy, single point of invoicing? That is a value that can save time and effort in the government money.

Did each MAS CTA partner within the contract terms? This can be confusing for the vendors and that this ETA lead, they do not govern the quote. If they are the lead in the design services provider, the partners price or what they bring to the table, if the lead had chairs on their contract, it does not matter and the price does not matter as they are bringing the items to comply with their terms.

As the agreement clearly outlines responsibilities of each partner? Look at the CTA and understands as you want a lead you will exclusively deal with, but if the chairs don’t show up, who is responsible? They figure out why these chairs are not there, hopefully they get them there, but that vendor may not deliver the chair and that is on the partner. You are pretty without partner as outlined in the responsibilities that they illustrate in the CTA.

A couple of additional questions, the scenario is at the top so we can remember, but what if the order is a set aside? We talked about that with the veteran-owned; all partners must be individually eligible for set aside. You can do that if they are eligible. Do you have to invoice all partners? Allowing the MAS CTA not requiring it, you have that contract, but invoicing goes to CTA and they can manage that. It should be in the agreement.

Can you contact individual partners? Yes, you have privy to the contract individually with the CTA members. Can you allow both MAS CTA and OLM? Yes. And you must contract use of other contracts? Yes. Where permissible or where reasonable, or you feel like there is a reason not to, we encourage you to use all of those.

Contractor use of MAS contracts, this is the last flexibility session. I will go quickly. I think this is a refresher. Contractors can purchase products and services from other MAS contractors for orders, fast, more efficient acquisition without increasing supply chain risk, and that is important points even talked about earlier. He talked about it under OLM, but this is similar. If these are OLM, they must comply with the terms and conditions.

Purchased from another MAS contractor, they comply with terms and conditions, but I would offer that contract or item specifically evaluated for the MAS CO versus they are required to go with terms and conditions on the ordering activity for the vendor to make sure. No MAS CO saw that OLM and the first time the government sees it is when they quote it. There is the extra layer of SCRIM pricing that is achieved when you have the vendors purchasing from other MAS contracts.

We talked about OneGov and they can have those pricing agreements, and there is no additional authorization required for MAS by default under that reference, and this is authorized. We also talked about the OneGov, and contractors have the discretion to decline orders. There may be a case where some of these discounts or other things where the contractor offering the discounts may not be willing to give them another contractor wanting to use that to supplement their quote.

Selling contractors provide product or service, they invoice the procuring contractor, selling contractor remits the IFF, and they can purchase to fulfill the order and follow the procedure and build the customer at the cost paid and identify the items. There is a nomenclature there for how to encourage them to identify them MAS selling contractor and contractor number.

Some bullets about documentation for both parties: competition or sole source justification, any of the quotes and communications between the two vendors, compliance maintaining records.

This I think is our last example scenario.

Customer requires products and services for large industry engagement event and requirements as AV equipment, support and services and software. Customer understands requirements and encourage them to have flexibility. Quote one is all single items is all and some has some MAS contract items where they purchase from a different contractor of 250K. Quote three his mostly MAS contract items and equipment is open market listed.

As the customer obligated for quote one because they are on a single contract? You probably know the answer is you have been paying attention. Quote two include items from other MAS contract without authorization, and should quote number three be considered?

Go ahead and do the first one. You are not obligated to award for number one because it allows flexibility unless you were restricting flexibility; it is not a limiting factor.

Can quote two have that without a specific authorization? Yes, they automatically allow for this.

Should quote number three even be considered? Likely not. There is talk about open markets and the open market seekers, but we really hope there will be limited circumstances where any open market consideration is necessary. In this example, likely you do not want to consider awarding to the open market items that are non MAS items and not obligated to meet the requirements, and they need to be purchase through non MAS procedures. Cumbersome process and figuring out what I have to do to purchase a portion of that through the procedures. Best to avoid that, just a we will not consider that.

What else do we consider? If no specific technical requirements do not limit. This is probably the most underutilized flexibility. I was happy when we had a GAO determination supporting this. If there is no reason, if you go under SIN1, by default it is how you, it is the vendors you want to submit the quote, but by default it does not limit them from grabbing any others on the MAS contract. If you have the cloud computing examples and you need to limit that, you want to be careful as it is specific in the RFQ document. Not just selecting certain ones, but the RFQ is limited to these SIN. If there is no reason to limit it, do not limit the flexibility unless you have to.

Allow and encourage flexibility; the more flexible they can be. Remember to consider best value. If you go back to the example, it is the highest price, but there may be some things meeting your requirements such as on-site technical support that is of value, and that justifies the options.

To summarize, avoid unnecessary SIN restrictions. Limit them only for justified technical needs. The flexibility is there by default, and if you need to limit, you should do so.

OLM we talked about a lot, and there are many questions, and we will have specific training sessions where we get more in the scenarios we talked about. Again, great tool, flexibility, remember it shifts the burden to the ordering activity, so there is obligation there when using that.

CTA allows multiple MAS contracts to collaborate, and is some unique industries utilize regularly. The limitation, each member has to be responsible for their work. Contractor use, they can leverage prevented GSA establish products and services. The most or least risky from a SCRIM perspective, they have gone through the review, before that contractor follows the ordering procedure and gets better discounts on top of the discounts, them as part of that, a useful tool, and I’m sure many of you have used it.

We are encouraging you to consider flexibility when appropriate. They are thereby default, leveraging them when you need to limit them, please be specific and intentional. One supplementary to what Steven was saying, if you are silent, the flexibilities are thereby default, and it is best practice. There are some examples with sample language you may want to use, but I encourage you to direct those partners, draw their attention to some sample RFQ language and some on the next slide as well, but the idea is some of the vendors are not familiar with all of this or at all, in some cases. Sample language that encourages them to consider all flexibilities. Remember these are here and go to this webpage.gov to see how it works. Do that at the earliest stage or when just talking about an upcoming opportunity, give the vendors a chance to do their own work, and maybe we could do a CTA thing. Give them that lead time to consider that and do their homework and get prepared, they will be able to be more ready to utilize the flexibilities when it comes time to respond to the RFQ.

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The first is an overarching flexibility and the other is SIN flexibility, a very underutilized flexibility. The more we can make customers aware, the more we make our vendors aware this is how SIN scope works on RFQ, the better. There is sample language there. I think that maybe it’s and I will hammer home this email address because we are getting great deep dive training. Things like just shooting us a message, scenarios are great. Go more in depth and give me deeper dive scenarios, or the scenarios are terrible. Let us know what training and tools will help you execute.

Looking for feedback and encourage you to reach out. I think that is all we have. We did pretty good on the time. Do we want to do some questions?

DANA ROSA: Yes. You answer this, can the percentage of OLM exceed 50% of pricing? And you touched on this in one of the slides, but there is no percentage tied to the OLM; they cannot be a preponderance.

JEFF CALHOUN: The order and level has a link on the screen right now and a great resource with a bunch of guidance of FAQ and speaks extensively to that content.

DANA ROSA: Does negotiation still exist when it comes to OLM? OLM is determined at the order level and must determine to be fair and reasonable. That is between the contractor and the order level CO. It is not at the schedule level.

JEFF CALHOUN: Escorted the price analysis, you must determine those to be fair and reasonable.

DANA ROSA: Who is responsible including GSA industrial funding for LLM in the contract? If the contractor quotes $1000 per OLM and does not include something else, should they assume the IFF is included?

JEFF CALHOUN: If I understand this, if I am a contractor and supplement the quote with $1000 of OLM, that includes the IFF and IMS remits that IFF associated with that.

DANA ROSA: Yes, they assume that is included, so yes, you should submit that.

JEFF CALHOUN: The bottom line is they report the sales, they remit the IFF.

DANA ROSA: How is performance handled for contract team arrangements in CPAR? Should they document under each contract or only under the CTA? We have guidance on GSA.gov related to CPAR, and as of right now, currently you only can submit for the contractor that has the largest revenue of sales. But you can manually submit for individual team members. We can also, when we get the written Q&A, we will provide a link to the CTA gsa.gov as it covers a lot of the questions I saw coming through and have provided a response to other written best practices.

On giving vendors guidance on how best to structure CTA or how best to update CTA requirements? On GSA.gov, we have recommended elements you should include in the CTA, and we include a MAS CTA template as an example. The elements we provide are recommended minimal elements, and you can include anything on that are on GSA.gov.

How does performance work after an award, and do I need to provide separate or joint performance feedback and I provide extra? This ties in the previous question I just answered. You provide past performance on the contractor with the largest revenue of sales under the order, but you can provide separate performance for individual team members.

JEFF CALHOUN: This is my understanding of the system. The system is going to transmit information to CPAR and flag you. That order, it is going to be due, and that will be one entity that should represent the largest dollar volume, but it does not mean you cannot go and say our chairs never showed up and I need to get that. Even if that was a smaller portion of the order, you can enter that.

DANA ROSA: How are other contractors practically accessing the product and services from other contractors, and do they have a separate ordering process?

JEFF CALHOUN: Steve and Michelle talked about this, and I think Steven made the point, it is on the vendors. They will be using Advantage for the systems to do this. It is on the vendors to figure out maybe they figure out who has what or something like that, that they utilize the systems.

DANA ROSA: Are other contractors able to see who responded to an RFQ in order for them to reach out to another contractor to team up with them for solicitation, or is the contract specialist’s job to team up with the contractors? From my understanding, CTAs are generally or should be called that in the RFQ and they are allowable. I am not sure if they can see who responded to the RFQ.

JEFF CALHOUN: The vendors would not see that information. This might be getting at the networking thing we talked about. How do vendors know who are the 50 people on MAS who do this solution that I don’t do? We have talked about ideas of how to get better at that from a program and to get better at vendor networking, and that is something we can take back again and is an area of improvement we could explore. But it is going to the industry events and knowing who your partners are, associated vendors who do things you don’t do. We will take that, it is an area we can get better working on that and take that back.

DANA ROSA: If a CTA of multiple contractors under the agreement offer the same item category in a different pricing, is the ordering agency obligated to go with the lowest cost, or can they choose any event since they are awarded items?

JEFF CALHOUN: If there is a CTA you’re getting one quote, whatever they quoted in the actual quote regardless if there was overlap in same or similar services or products, you are going by what they quoted. Even if I have a project manager that is cheaper than Dana’s and Dana is the quoting manager, that is quoted from the contract as that was outlined in the agreements and Dana would do the project management services.

DANA ROSA: If a BPA awarded under specific SIN, are the orders they send to only those as well as LLM in the specifically prohibited? I’m asking for the solicitation from a BPA awarded against this.

JEFF CALHOUN: If I understand the question, are you saying to die at the BPA level not defined SIN and at the call, allow the awardee to pull from any? Answer is yes. I think yes, but let me take that back and talk to my colleagues as that is a layer of flexibility I have not considered, but thinking through it, I think it is in line with the determination and is in line with what we consider this to be the ordering agreements.

I used to work in the national furniture center, and I refer to chairs, but if somebody if it is a total outfitting and they had the full chairs that was not envisioned, but is still within the BPA within scope of that call, I tend to think you would have that flexibility. You have the scope limited to these five SIN, and if the scope is limited to MAS contract items, they are these things, you would have that flexibility. You get a written response to that.

DANA ROSA: Will GSA conduct a training for the various MAS holders for this in the future so we can have the flexibility to acquire this?

JEFF CALHOUN: That is a great question, and we have been fast and furious trying to meet all of the customer requests, rightfully so. We have given versions of some of the training sessions to industry partners and we will have those engagements with them. We had at the coalition for government procurement, we presented some of the material directly to vendors and have been out there as much as we can and will continue to do so. Encourage them to go to the GSA.gov page as that is a good entry point and gets you to all of these OLM FAQs. You can point them also to our email if they have questions.

DANA ROSA: I linked in the chat the MAS flexibilities page because I do see multiple questions come in for that link. New aircraft cons signed the difference between open market items and OLM?

JEFF CALHOUN: Open market items are non-MAS items not procured through any procedure, not obligated to the terms of MAS contract. OLM is specific to the SIN and must comply with all terms and conditions and are permitted through the procedures. That is the bottom line. There are no order procedures and open market, and that is up to you to figure out how you need to do what you need to do to make it okay versus OLM. We have clearly defined ordering procedures and how it works for an RFQ.

KELLY WHITFIELD: Thank you so much, this has been great, and it is 11:59. We are coming up on time, and I want to say thank you both Jeff and Dana as this has been wonderful information, great questions coming in, and I enjoyed listening to that.

Any final comments Dana or Jeff before we go in our lunch break coming up?

DANA ROSA: I will throw the plug if you have questions that come up, use our MAS PMO.gov email address.

KELLY WHITFIELD: Absolutely. Thank you. Jeff, final comments.

JEFF CALHOUN: That is it. I would say we are fast and furious trying to get effective guidance out there. Any feedback you can give us or how it worked, what you would like to see more or less of, what gaps you see, let us know.

KELLY WHITFIELD: Thank you both. Great information. Really appreciate it. I am going to go ahead and post the survey in the chat. Use that survey if you would like to provide feedback as this was this deep dive on MAS flexibilities, and if you want to get feedback, use that survey.

It is now noon Eastern time, and it is time for break. We will go on break starting at 1:00 p.m. Eastern time. One hour we will come back and get started with our next session: partnerships to power progress, the onegov framework.

I hope you can go grab some food, do what you need to do, join us in one hour, and I will leave the webinar open with the slides and promote music, but great information this morning, and hopefully everyone has been enjoying it as much as I have.

With that, I will the promo reel, and I hope to see you all again in one hour. Have a great lunch.

KELLY WHITFIELD: Hello, and I hope everyone got to go get lunch or whatever you needed to do for an hour. We will be starting in four minutes. Hello, to everyone. We will get started in four minutes. Thank you so much. Tamika, did you have anything to add?

TAMIKA COLEMAN: No, I think you covered it all. Just a quick reminder to everyone to drop any questions in the Q&A, and I am looking forward to this next session.

KELLY WHITFIELD: Absolutely. Thank you so much. Our next session is, “When can I use a generative AI to help draft my requirements?” We will learn about the strengths and weaknesses of using a large language model to help develop your SAW and how to identify basic engineering practices to improve your results. Without further ado, I will pass it over to team presenters for this session, and they are all stars, and I have worked for them for years. No pressure. Andrea Azarcon Heller, Brad Ludlow, two of our all-stars. Go ahead and take it away. We have great expectations. You will do great.

ANDREA AZARCON HELLER: It is two and a half or three as we also have Danielle back from this morning. With that monitoring of the Q&A and trying to address things as we go through. Kelly, do you mind if I take over the screen share?

KELLY WHITFIELD: Yes, please go ahead.

Generative AI

ANDREA AZARCON HELLER: I need to share just the tabs so let me work on that. “When can I use generative AI to draft my requirements?” Spoiler alert, you can use it now

I am Andrea Azarcon Heller, I am the generative AI program manager, and I am going to, okay, and it is not sharing. One of the things that I did, you want us to introduce ourselves briefly, I thought I could do this or weave it in the demo, so I asked ChatGPT to make me a bio. I thought make it sound like me, and the word synergy is good. It gave me an additional version, and I said I wanted to sound like me, but this will live on the Internet, and I don’t want to regret it either. It iterated some more.

It’s not fun or funny, and I think I am fun or funny, so it edited it one more time, and I landed without work and Federal acquisition focusing on helping the workforce and reducing the amount of time staring at a blank document. A brief demo before the demo, and I am going to hand it over to Danielle and Brad for a moment.

BRAD LUDLOW: I do not have a generative of an introduction. I am Brad Ludlow, and I work with Andrea on the AI program implementation team at GSA. We are doing work and trying to help bring the best parts of AI to the workforce as well as making sure it is safe and sane and useful and user.

DANIELLE MOUW: You are in for a treat today. It is going to be great. Definitely open up your websites and play around with us if you are able to access something through the training as we encourage that. I am Danielle, and they have invited me to come on and demo AI. We tried to encourage AI. And it is a great thing to be able to see sandboxes and test all of this out even while we are undergoing massive changing in the space with the RFO, and I will talk more about that, and I’m happy to be here.

BRAD LUDLOW: Let’s start with talking about what we mean when we talk about generative AI. It is a very specific term, and you will hear, I hear all of the time AI this and AI that. I don’t really quite know what it means when it says it is enhanced, but it’s used as a buzzword, sometimes correctly, some sometimes not.

When using the term generative AI, we are talking about an algorithm-based system that is creating new novel contents based off of it has learned from the data. It takes a large model of language, billions of books and webpages, learns how humans speak and uses that to determine and identify what it wants to tell you and can be interactive.

This is what is used for dressing documents, for taking a big article and asking it to summarize the best parts and the most important parts, answering general questions, generating ideas, and these are the types of things you may be using AI for, and you want to consider using AI for. These are also the commercially available things that use generative AI including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Facebook. There are levels that are out there, and there are others in addition to that. For clarity’s sake, that is what we’re talking about when we talk about AI.

If we jump to the next slide, I have another slide for you. This is to generate some thoughts and get ideas of where we are at. What comes to your mind when you hear about generative AI in the federal workplace? You are welcome to take the chat and type in what you are thinking. I say cautious, job loss, ChatGPT, exciting. This is really running the gamut of the engagement here is amazing. I cannot read this nearly as quickly as you are going, but I really do see a huge variety of thoughts, and a lot of them have a lot of trepidation associated with them, and that is okay. I also share a lot of these. What we will do today is talk through, let’s give it a moment, but we will talk about what we could be using this for in the workplace as we are in the acquisition space where it could be useful and where you want to execute your judgment.

What I want to get out of this is that the folks who are more trepidation about this to come out of this with a little more confidence of what you can do to experiment with it in a safe way, and you may be able to find some value and be able to identify limitations so you are really getting the most out of this.

Today we are talking about what AI can be used for, what it explicitly is really bad at, how we use it responsibly and effectively within the acquisition work, very particular, and what this means for the revolutionary part overall.

That is the ideal for today. We will jump to slide number six where this is I cannot give you a good answer as to what a federal employee is allowed or not allowed to do. Every agency right now has very different roles, and one piece of your homework is going to be to learn what your agency’s policy is. That way you are not in violation of that.

At GSA we have access to a few models that are publicly available, so we can use them for general workplace stuff like help me write this email, but anything that involves procurement sensitive information is not okay unless you are using our internal jewel that is GSA AI, and that can be CUI.

There are 50 different agencies and different sets of rules, and more as we go through. I cannot tell you what you are or not allowed to do, but make sure whatever you take from this that you are within your agency’s rules and requirements.

DANIELLE MOUW: I am going to give you a brief demo on the websites. Why are we talking about this? We talk about the shifts and RFO as a shift from compliance-based thinking to more innovative, risk-taking type of thinking. To do that, we have to be empowered, and this particular class or teaser, if you will, is all about helping you to feel more curious and more empowered to go out and try things.

At GSA we are likely to have different tools to help us synthesize and integrate this overhaul and how we think about regulations and the acquisition environments, and this is the one thing I want you to take away from today’s training, and we will have many more trainings on this topic. I want you to bookmark this link, and I will put it in the chat. We gave an overview of this, and this is where you can find out if your agency is using the new revolutionary overhaul, if you’re using the old FAR or the new one. And this is where you can find all best practices and how-to guidance out of the regulations that now live in the FAR companion, and you can find out how to buy the commercial force mindset and in the buying guidance, and this is where you can get support on learning about this with the albums and so much more.

I share this with you because when you go to see or play around with your LLM or ChatGPT, and you will see Andrea with that, one thing where socializing is to use the new article language because if you don’t, it will default to the old language. And she will talk about the training that goes in these platforms and how this is limited, and we have to be educated and get literate together on making sure we speak correct source information from one guard rail when asking questions from our large language models.

Back over here, quickly, to the slides, just want to make sure you know the RFO has given a brand new framework and is literally codified and 101. And if you are so inclined to go check it out, this is a much more entertaining way to find out about it and with Andrea’s demo. So your kit now is the new regulations that can be covered, and obey, use discretion and the FAR companion verbiage.

All of the training resources to support you, plus if you are at GSA or other places able to stand out with the LLM, that is also part of the toolkit, and hopefully you will find out how.

I think someone else is up next.

BRAD LUDLOW: This is what you get when you have three presenters jumping back and forth.

DANIELLE MOUW: Tag teaming is great.

BRAD LUDLOW: You can read this slide, and I am going to tell a short story of what I use AI for in the workplace. I have done user research for a large chunk of my job, and I can type in it and say I am looking to put together a research plan for this tool and this is what it does, this is what I want to test, and it will spit something else. I will start to take a look at it, and it will be four of them that are really stupid.

I just get rid of them because they are not invaluable.

Three of them I need to review, and once I did not think about before.

I will put the text back in and say what I’m forgetting, what did I not fit in, and what am I thinking about, and it may give me some ideas I may not have thought about. Again, this is the LLM or tools, not people part. It is coming from the huge amounts of information that is read in the past.

It is taking what is on the Internet and putting up research programs. This is where it is coming out front. There is not anything stopping it from thinking it has a really good idea and actually pulling from that completely wrong place, and I asked for a research plan, and it talks about microbiology and is related to research. That can happen, and we need to be careful that we are not taking information that is making up or hallucinating. This is not the final answer. Never ever take a response that AI gives you and just copy and paste it and reading what it says. You have no idea if it is going to be completely wrong, and the only way to do it is to double check. It should not go to your contracting officer or superiors and say I decided we are going to go this way because that is what ChatGPT says.

That is a really good reason. If ChatGPT suggested something and I look in it and decide it was a good idea for these reasons, it is a totally different argument.

It was really bad, and it can hallucinate a lot for generative citations, legal citations, policy conclusions. It can make things up. You need to double check all of that kind of stuff. If it says because of 14.3, you should do XYZ, you need to go look up FAR 14.3 unless you are familiar with that and you know for a fact as a subject matter expert it is correct.

DANIELLE MOUW: Just bringing it on home, really getting in where the rubber meets the road with CAI, why does all of this matter? If the FAR part streamlined by a lot, those who now are new to government, you have PDFs and consider yourself very lucky to be walking in a brand new innovative environment not having to and learn a lot of the things some asked are having to retrain our brains on. It is readable, plain language. We have new regulations that innovate to end this is part of the toolkit. We want to make sure we are responsible with it, and we understand how to fight in the guardrails.

Understanding how to take these calculated risks and use new tools for the next generation of acquisition of best practices.

BRAD LUDLOW: We will go deeper in hallucinations. I cannot stress enough what I said in the beginning that this is predicting the next best word based off of the information that it has. It is incapable of doing consideration and comprehension and the way that we as humans think about comprehension. When we use words like it is thinking about, it is considering these things, it’s taking this into account, and that is us using words to describe what it is doing, but it is not thinking the same way as we do. Because of that, it can confidently tell you something that is absolutely incorrect and will never know unless you tell us.

This is a little hard to read, but this is a famous thing that came up a few years ago and someone saying the cheese was not sticking to their pizza and Google suggested putting glue on the pizza so it would stick to the pizza. It says this confidently. There were lawyers using briefs that are being cited for ChatGPT. This is your responsibility to make sure a subject matter expert has eyes on anything you need to before you publish any elicitation using AI to help you develop that staff. The way to do that is on the next slide. I will take it off to Andrea to work on prompting, and that is the term for how we can put in a better prompt to get a better response. Andrea, do you want to take it from here?

ANDREA AZARCON HELLER: Yes, it is a great and easy transition from eating glue as a kindergartner.

Prompting, what is that? It is the thing that you put in and type in the LLM, and then it gives you the output. You are an acquisition professional expert. Review the attached document and identify those that may be missing. Explain why you think there is something missing, why it is important, what happens if I don’t include that, or why that may not be necessary.

The reason prompting is important is because good prompts help you clearly define the role you want AI to play. And some people there is the other point outside if you define the role that is essentially loading the AI in terms of the output that you get, and there are pros and cons. I like to define the role. I don’t like to define just the output unless I know I want to use it in a specific way. I personally do not use that as a default. I only do it if I say that is not how I wanted it because I did not tell it in the beginning, or I did not know what I did not know.

Good prompts encourage critical thinking and or uncertainty. That is what you are, therefore, the contracting person. I showed this earlier, and this is an example prompt. Here is a role, here is a clear task. Identify the specific requirements and structure the output you want. This is a screenshot, but there was a statement or requirements document that was uploaded, and Gemini was like, okay, I reviewed this. I think you are missing this, and this is why it is important and the potential impacts of not including the information, and this may be why I am wrong.

Here are other potential prompts. Plain language specialist, you want to make it easier to understand without changing what you want the contractor to do.

Understand making sure they understand what is being asked while entering the government asks what it wants. When I am prompting for something like that, I like to give an additional prompt saying you are an industry person, you are a business development representative, these are the requirements. Does this make sense from that perspective? I am working on something like that right now. If they don’t understand it and code it the way you are wanting the outcome to be, you are not necessarily going to get what is intended for the mission.

Here is another slightly different for clarity, organization. It is great for organizing large amounts of information.

Reviewing the draft requirements and evaluation criteria, is there anything that does not tieback to requirements from for many evaluation standards, and explain why that may be an issue. If you have a requirement and no means of evaluating, that opens you up for protest.

What if I don’t have requirements? What if I am in the beginning of my acquisition and I want to make them? That is where we go in the live demo piece. Let me see if I can do this without freezing.

I am going to do this a few different ways. I will go to GSA AI or USA AI. Let’s pretend I am working on a buy for marketing automation software. We have some already, and if we have to go with a different vendor, no big deal. What should my level objectives be? We are going to start there. Software as a service, obviously.

I will change this from relatively basic to sonic for, and notice there are different models as GSA employees that we have access to. Unless you are working with a really big requirement or have an insanely large file you are uploading, probably not going to need something super advanced. You would need something lightweight or something martinet to recognize this is a complex asked, and I will handle it accordingly and not take forever, or this is a simple asked, and I will handle it accordingly and not eat all of your tokens. I will hit send. Because I have been doing a lot in there, it may impact how fast or not faceted response.

Here are my level objectives. Connect with other systems, be able to scale as you will hire people, you will not hire people, people will leave, and you need it to be functional so people do not complain about the user interface. If you are not familiar with marketing automation, it runs campaigns, it nurtures leads, it does analytics. It has to be compliant because it is the federal government. Things to consider as well as procurement strategy.

DANIELLE MOUW: If I can hop in for a moment. If you scroll back to the top and show your prompt, I want to make sure folks realize the different things you can leave to the prompting. What if we go with a different vendor? Question high level objectives be? You could also add something like “ask me questions if you need to clarify the task.” You can direct the technology to do that. You can paste in a specific part to say “referred to this as you go” if you are trying to draft something specific. Just additional ideas as you play around with this.

ANDREA AZARCON HELLER: I said I am not going to a contract or system either way. If I end up with a different vendor, there will be some transition in and some transition out.

I should have conveyed that in my requirements. Data migration, you have to get your step out and back in somewhere else. Make sure you did not lose anything. Make sure you have things that you already did. Project timelines are for edge. Document everything. Knowledge transfer between contractors and the government. There will be some overlap, and that is intentional. You do not have to use complete words.

Also, I obviously have a history here with the GSA AI chat, and it has learned how I like to talk to it, and therefore, it has learned how to talk to me.

I will do one more. Do I want to think about specific aspects of set up? Not quite yet. But, I want the vendor to make sure they articulate how they are going to manage and increase this. I put the user adoption piece. I see a question, do I have to upload the whole document if over 100 pages? You do not have to upload. It depends on the link. Can you upload your whole document? Yes. Should you upload a 100-page document? You may want to try doing it in pieces, and you may want to do a straight up copy and paste. You don’t have to necessarily upload. As Danielle was saying with the FAR, you can just copy and paste text from a website or a document straight in the prompt. You can see here, this is how the requirements are with the strategy.

Why should I consider as a success metric? What should this measure that is meaningful, but also not too much, or they want to murder me in my sleep?

One thing I say when I’m doing civilian services acquisition workshops or coaching on an RFO is we measure all of these things, but one thing is important, and can the COR manage the workload? More often than not, the COR is not just that COR of that particular password; they have other work they need to do as well. You want to make sure you are giving the appropriate amount of work so they can give the appropriate amount of support.

AI understanding sarcasm, it depends, but the way that I do it is that it understands sarcasm when I am making it because that is typically how I engage or how I type; that is how I engage with the AI. It talks back to me in that way as a result unless I specifically tell it not to.

Here is a balance of success that your COR will find manageable.

DANIELLE MOUW: Maria raises a good point. You picked up on the fact she typed COR as an acronym. It came back that said COR metrics as core, and that is something you have to be careful of. Notices as core-friendly approach later on down the road, but that is exactly why we need a human, and I thought that was great feedback she picked up on that.

ANDREA AZARCON HELLER: User engagement, operational efficiency, business impacts. These are things they want to consider measuring, and some things they don’t want to measure, and framing it as business health indicators rather than performance metrics. I love the language gymnastics.

I think you can still see this. We did the live demo, and we want to reiterate the following.

DANIELLE MOUW: I will take a moment to slide 20 just to answer a quick question. I think it was Matthew. I wanted to let you know we are piloting a lot around the use of AI, meaning experimenting with the largest language models and how you see Andrea doing that. We are trying to understand and test it out with the four companion tools as we know professionals, the industry professionals are using AI. It has become a dirty word as much as a buzzword, and we want to have a culture and agency where we have covered questions. We want to have open piloting and testing of this with guard rails and per agency policy so we can learn what is working well with our tools and feed the correct data, meaning what you see on your screen and using the language, using the mental guidance, making sure you feed at four companion best practices that are vetted and created with.

The acquisition advocates and practitioners and policy experts. Using source information and the AI to help summarize and to improve a particular sample or template. The alignment is on you as a business advisor, and we have many CORs on the call, but it is a team sport, and we have to make sure we go to the source language before we put that as part of the toolkit.

On the next slide, I want to emphasize the biggest piece of all is the cultural piece as we understand we have a lot to unlearning to do. You will be able to see there is the memo on the left symbolizing new policy. We have you all and the different teams involved helping us to integrate and bridge regulation and policy in that space. Technology is the technology; it is not a human. It is on access practitioners to socialize the change, to help could edit and practice and felt empowered and make you part of the training code creation efforts and share samples and help us scale what is the best so everyone can benefit from that. And that is why we talk about this as it is a platform to get out to more people and here about where the gaps are in your agencies and understand challenges you face within the local shops along this. It all comes down to people.

Before I turn it back over to Andrea and give space for the Q&A, it’s an excellent resource that we built together, and I wanted to put AI resources front and center on the top left. So as I talked about our related topics and innovating acquisition, we do it with AI in the conversation, and that prompt engineering is huge and looks like she will show you that.

The community of practice elements captured on this is really great. I take this credential over the winter break, and it is not acquisition eyes, and there is opportunity to translate and make this more user friendly for you as members of the acquisition team, and I’m happy to have a conversation about that as we try out different things with the prompts, and I’m trying to share the acquisition prompting techniques.

You can reach out to Andrea with questions. She is an amazing person and is helping us coach a lot of people to try out new and abated techniques and how to integrate AI with it. That is how we get better is trying it out and sharing what works and what doesn’t.

This will give you links to go to with the training and including her tech access COP and different courses we are building every day.

Appreciate you all, and if you have any questions, do not hesitate to email me. Go therefore testing and coaching, and non-GSA folks with questions about RFO specifically, SAG is a great resource, and I know the folks there can answer the questions. You can have places to go if you want to ask questions about AI, ask Andrea. I will pass it over to her to finish up and open it up for Q&A.

Generative AI Q&A

ANDREA AZARCON HELLER: That is a lot of related resources. As Brad mentioned, we cannot speak for all of the federal employees. Learn your agency’s AI usage policy. What models you are allowed to use and what you are able to put in there. Taking the engineering courses on there and access it through FAI or WAU. Explore and experiment on your own time. I have an assistant in Google called “Hey G, me” and that tells me what I have going on personally at the beginning of each week. Going to the doctor, remembering people’s birthdays as I don’t use Facebook anymore because it is a dumpster fire.

Thank you, we are going to get to questions. Kelly, do you want me to go through them or do you see anything and we can address them?

KELLY WHITFIELD: Absolutely. If you see any off the bat, go ahead. We have a good amount of time to keep going through them.

BRAD LUDLOW: There are a few about what agencies have access to GSA AI chat. Can you talk a little bit about that program?

ANDREA AZARCON HELLER: The answer is it depends. There are a lot of agencies that have had things from the USA AI team, and there are several that are using it right now either a sandbox or an in-production environment.

Education, Commerce, Housing, OPM, Transportation, Agriculture, DOI, Peace Corps, National Credit Administration, Housing and Urban Development, State Office of the Attorney General, and the Federal Trade Commission.

BRAD LUDLOW: This is a shared service kind of thing being kicked off with different agencies, but I cannot speak to what the conversations and implementations are, but I expect this to be rolled out to more agencies as time goes on. If you are not mentioned, you will be in the future at some point.

ANDREA AZARCON HELLER: It looks like what I have on the screen where it has different models you can pick from.

DANIELLE MOUW: I am happy to support on some of the acquisition-related questions.

ANDREA AZARCON HELLER: Brad, do you want to pick more out?

BRAD LUDLOW: Yes. Can you speak a little more about how, there are a few questions you would do well to discuss. If vendors are using AI to draft their responses or draft proposals, what does that mean for you as someone reviewing the proposal and what responsibilities do you have or what responsibilities do they still have?

ANDREA AZARCON HELLER: They have been doing that longer than you think. You know about it now because it is in the press, it is on LinkedIn, it is discussed in forums like this. That being said, it is on you as the contracting person to do the critical thinking, and my spider senses are telling me this may have been created by AI if it is. That is fine. There is nothing preventing vendors from doing that. You have to do that step. What additional questions should we be asking to figure that out, and you can ask AI to help identify that use of mitigating AI, and that is three different layers.

DANIELLE MOUW: I would say we are not trying. This is a shift in the RFO, and we are moving out of the 5000 pages of prescribing how things should be. We are trying to move toward an outcomes-oriented environment where we permit for the best possible proposals and evaluate better capabilities. And we write evaluation criteria that the proposals we are getting, whether they use AI, write them or not, we will be able to evaluate or that the capability that we need, and we can actually do the work. If we need to have people come in and give demonstrations and verify they actually are capable, that is a macro-level answer to the question. We are not in the business of trying to “got you” if they use the AI to write the evaluation criteria.

To Andrea’s point, we need to be aware and looking for this and set up solicitations in such a way we give ourselves the reins to look in and verify we get the capabilities. That is a whole discussion we should do that on.

ANDREA AZARCON HELLER: Good point.

BRAD LUDLOW: There are a few questions in this sphere, but it says it really well. Speak to it directly, but can you touch a little on the impacts of the level set on the AI thresholds? A low level may lead to “glue the cheese on the pizza” situations, and ideally should a government tool be set in a high confidence level, especially issues like procurement?

DANIELLE MOUW: I was reading the chat while you were reading that. Can you summarize one more time, and I will go for it.

BRAD LUDLOW: What confidence level should you have the responses? Do you give your personal confidence, and what level of confidence if you have this available and it does exist on the models to set only respond within a small window unless you are super confident and did not respond at all?

DANIELLE MOUW: Are we talking specific about confidence ratings or are you talking about confidence in the AI? I am not clear based on how you read the question. I don’t know if you can clarify in writing as that is part of the answer. I will touch on this quickly from Linda. Linda asked some important questions about the best use or acquisition court duties, and a lot of the training materials out right now are very heavily FAR-centric and focus because the professional space and 1102 primarily. But many are wearing a lot of the acquisition guidance is well developed, so you will see an opportunity to fill the gaps with court-centric and respective training materials and resources with regard to any at this.

Same for PM and for legal. It is a team sport, but the bias is on that buyer perspective. So one good thing you can do as ACO are his share of the and tools and all of the resources, everything you learn about LLM with your teams, and that is a major thing is make sure they know about RFO in the discretion given grandpa size for this.

We did get some feedback in the last question with confidence about AI with the internal level to provide that answer or not.

DANIELLE MOUW: That is more how it is built and what it is trained on.

ANDREA AZARCON HELLER: If you are going in and asking a question, there is some prompting you can do around that, but that being said, because you are using the LLM, there is only so much you can control. Where you may have control over something like that is if you are building an agent or chatbot, and you are like, I have all of this information, here is the prompt, return the results, which give me the levels of confidence, how much it matches. And as the CO, I will make the decision if a project manager is $75 and something else is 75% confident you can put in your IGC. You have to do the work so the confidence of the AI is trained on what it is trained on and take that with a grain of salt. And there is more work that can be done by technical folks building out specific use cases. How much does the project manager in Huntsville cost? They have security clearance.

DANIELLE MOUW: Remember it is not trained on the new RFO and the entire framework of the acquisition.gov. Unless you feed a new RFO and feed it the old RFO, it is not going to get the difference between the two in an accurate way. That is why we have the conversations. It is a great question.

BRAD LUDLOW: This is looking for a specific confidence number, but this is not going to do that. But if you work with your prompt engineering and what you are feeding it and asking it to do, saying, “I am looking for a pizza place open on Sunday, give me a list of every pizza place within 5 miles at my house.” It will give you a response, and some it may be closed on Sunday, and it messes up. If you say, “I am looking for a pizza place open on Sunday, give me a list of each one. For each one, I want you to go in their website and look at their open hours, and if they are not open on Sunday, do not return this to me.” You will more likely have it not screw up the way you ask questions. The prompt engineering can be really helpful in setting that up. I don’t think you will get the confidence number unless you specifically try to train it on what is the high confidence or low confidence and work with it back and forth to train it to give a confidence number.

The class I am pitching does a lot of work to train you how to train it to do that. It can be very useful. You will always need to deal with hallucinations. It is inherent to this technology that until there is a massive change in the way it works fundamentally, you will always need to be wary of hallucinations and double check everything when you’re doing it in a legal way as when setting up a task order or anything like that, you are the one responsible.

This is a workplace productivity tool and not a replacement tool.

ANDREA AZARCON HELLER: We have had some conversation around the people who have mentioned it, but I am physically acknowledging it by showing it on the screen, “Avenue I don’t want to use it,” and these are the reasons. From the zombie apocalypse to “I’m tired” and everything in between. “Tell me in this comedic style because I want to be entertained.” Zombie apocalypse, we just expose it to the Internet panic attack. “I am tired, and this is just another thing, and I want to go home and turn my computer off.” “Please give me that in a table.”

Here are the things identified in the table. Is there anything you are missing as I feel like there are more situations? Yes, I have some additional things. Remember I wanted a table. It gave it to me not in a table, so I switched the model to Claude and said that is not a table, and it finally gave me a table. These are the things we are dealing with, and that is okay.

That is why we are encouraging folks to explore as you will not figure out if that fear is founded in reality unless you work through it.

KELLY WHITFIELD: Thank you so much. We are coming up on the hour, and I would like to start with saying if you would like to get feedback for this session, go to the link and give feedback. This was the AI session. When you choose it, go to that one.

Thank you Danielle, Andrea, Brad, amazing job as this was great with a lot of information. Any final thoughts before we close?

ANDREA AZARCON HELLER: Sometimes it would be more work than if you did it yourself and sometimes not, but it’s up to you to figure out where that line is and when you need to use your brain and when you need to use something in addition to your brain.

BRAD LUDLOW: I will lead with the next presenters are awesome, so you should stay for the next class.

DANIELLE MOUW: If you have any RFO specific questions, email Zach at testing or me directly at GSA to make sure you get these questions answered. Thank you so much to everyone.

Partnerships that power progress: The OneGov framework

KELLY WHITFIELD: Okay. Thank you so much. Our next session is “Partnerships That Power Progress: The OneGov Framework.” Without further ado, I will go ahead and pass it over to Jeremy, Jaime, excellent presenters as Brad mentioned. Go ahead and turn it over to you, and thank you so much.

JEREMY WUSTNER BROWN: Thank you so much. Appreciate that. That is high praise coming from Mr. Ludlow, so I appreciate that, and I think following a panel like the one Danielle, Andrea, and Brad just hosted is a tough act to follow, but I will do my best. I was not able to catch the whole presentation the last few minutes, but I am hoping that our esteemed panelists did plant a seed to talk about OneGov that exists where you can purchase your artificial intelligence solutions. Outside of USA AI, GSA AI, this is where you get it, or some pretty incredible things.

I am Jeremy, and I support the stakeholder engagement of the OneGov team, and we are here to talk about how GSA strategy is helping agencies like yours buy smarter, faster, and get better from your IT investments. We will walk through that OneGov strategy and what it means and how we partner with industry to deliver technology across the federal government.

I will throw this out there, in case someone missed it, GSA’s role is to help agencies access the products and services that they need, delivering value to government and the American people. Within GSA, you have the Federal Acquisition Service, and we lead that effort managing government-wide contracts and working with industry to make acquisition more efficient, consistent, and cost-effective. OneGov builds on that foundation and takes a more coordinated and data-driven approach for how we buy and manage technology across the government.

I am joined today by the real expert here, Jaime Martinez, the Division Director for Acquisition.

We will start with a quick overview of the strategy, what it is, why we are taking this approach, and then we will walk through what we see in practice and give some examples. How agencies are using the model.

We will cover how it works, how we engage with our original equipment manufacturers, and you will hear me say OEM, and how we prioritize the engagements and how the schedule supports delivery of this is really the foundational contract we use.

We will touch on what this means in terms of results, solutions available today and like generative AI, and what we have learned as we scale this project.

Here’s the cleaned-up text with single spaces, paragraph breaks, and unbolded names:

We will close with where we are headed next and how you can engage with us.

At its core, the strategy is the enterprise approach to how the federal government buys and manages common IT. Today, many agencies have the same products and services separately. Different pricing, different terms, different levels of performance. The fragmentation limits visibility, creates inconsistency, and makes it harder to manage risk across the enterprise.

OneGov is designed to address that by bringing those efforts together. We can approach the market more consistently using shared data and coordinated demands. This supports Executive Order 14240 calling for reducing duplication and improving efficiency and ensuring that government is getting cost-effective commercial solutions.

We started OneGov with enterprise software when it was most visible, and we are continuing to expand in areas like the cloud, cybersecurity, and infrastructure, and we will get into some of the details of that.

This is not a new contract vehicle; it’s built on the Multiple Award Schedule, focusing on how we engage, working more directly with OEM to establish consistent pricing, terms, and expectations across the government.

At a high level, that approach leads to more consistent outcomes, more predictable pricing, clear accountability, stronger security expectations, and a simpler acquisition experience for agencies.

With any luck you have seen recent coverage and groundwork on OneGov, and we are not short on supply of it. We are starting to see consistent attention across the federal IT and acquisition with the press, agency forums, and that tells us this approach is resonating, and agencies are looking for more ways to buy and industry is engaging in that shift. More importantly, the attention is driven by results.

Let me show you what this looks like in practice. The system real-world use cases and success stories. These examples show how OneGov is changing the way federal agencies buy and deliver, and stories demonstrate faster buying, stronger pricing, and measurable mission impacts. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and their work with Amazon Web Services and how GDIT is involved. CMS had a need to move fast, and they transitioned a number of applications they were hosting to the cloud using the OneGov model.

GDIT supported the agreements with AWS, delivering significant taxpayer savings. The savings are now being reinvested in digital services for senior citizens and vulnerable populations. It shows how OneGov supports adoption and speed and scale.

Department of Treasury and ID.me. Treasury identified the need for identity services, working with the Multiple Award Schedule or MAS IT team and ID.me, and awarded a $1 billion Blanket Purchase Agreement. And the MAS Teams answered this directly and ordered a task order in 45 days. It established permanent pricing, eliminating repetitive negotiation. It created a usable and secure digital identity solution for broader government use.

We have the Department of Transportation and Google Workspace. DOT used OneGov to secure an $89 million enterprise license for Google Workspace, and initial onboarding happened in 22 days with rollout expanding across 50,000 employees. By leveraging government-wide demands, DOT received better pricing and simplified procurement terms, and the examples highlight collaboration in IT modernization at scale.

With that I will hand it over to Jaime to talk about the four pillars, the direct contract division, the tiered approach we are taking to OEM onboarding, and a bit more about the role of the multiple awards.

JAIME MARTINEZ: As we begin, I would like to provide context on what OneGov is and what we mean about OneGov and what we consider our four pillars of the OneGov engagement with the pillars. The first is a direct contract with OEM and the GSA Multiple Schedule, contracting with the OEM establishing a single catalog for the OEM products rather than having multiple versions spread across the different versions. For GSA and the government, this improves accuracy, agility, and the catalog and helps to ensure that end-of-life products are timely from the supply chain and only genuine products are represented.

Second, pricing based on the government as we are looking for a discount of one, but for the government-wide enterprise discounts. Third is a full catalog of offerings and the agencies needed, and we want to make sure it is available in contract. Finally, verifiable data to calculate cost savings. These four pillars are what make the contractor part of OneGov and what we are looking to achieve in the industry engagements.

At a high level, this is the model of where it is headed with direct relationship with the OEM. As Jeremy mentioned, agencies have purchased through multiple layers, and vendors, they can create variations and pricing and conditions and visibility. We are working to establish more direct agreements with the OEM who support these products using the Multiple Award Schedule as a foundation.

This allows us to set more consistent pricing and terms at the enterprise level while creating a clear line of accountability with performance, security, and support. At the same time, partners continue to play a critical role for resellers, integrators, and small business are essential for integration and support. The differences of the roles are more clearly aligned within an OEM lead structure, and over time the goal is a more streamlined model where agencies access the offerings with a single consistent framework with pricing and terms established up front with the Multiple Award Schedule.

The next piece is how we focus our efforts, and this is the tiered engagement model. The federal IT marketplace is vast, and not every provider has the same government-wide footprint or strategic importance. This model helps us prioritize where we engage first, ensuring our resources are concentrated where they can deliver the greatest enterprise value.

We have structured our OneGov engagement in four tiers based on the overall governance spend, agency reach, and impacts of the federal operations.

It includes the largest OEM with government-wide contracts and mission-critical platforms with companies like Microsoft, Adobe, Google, and those providers who touch nearly every agency and represent the greatest opportunity for standardization and savings.

Tier two covers OEM with multiple agency use focused on specialized capabilities like cybersecurity, workflow, or analytics.

Tier three includes niche providers with federal adoption, and those are innovators that can start with one or two agencies and scale quickly under the model.

Tier four represents OEM with a small footprint typically between 10 to 50 million in total spend across the five or more CFO agencies.

This tiered model helps us to support data-driven decision-making. As we collect more information on usage, cost, and performance, we can move the OEM up and down based on the outcomes, helping us to keep our strategy dynamic accountable. In short, it gives us focus without being too rigid and helps to prioritize the enterprise and contracts while enabling a vision and competition from smaller players.

Multiple Award Schedule, it is and remains central to how the system works and is the foundation for the strategy. And by using the MAS, we can streamline and scale the agreements while keeping the acquisition process lean and accessible to agencies. Under this model, it offers clear advantages for the government and industry. And for agencies, stronger buying power with the government-wide negotiations going beyond individual agency thresholds. You get this across the agencies; no more paying different rates for the same product, improved compliance and risk management through the standardized terms and conditions, faster acquisition cycles because we are negotiating and vetting, and greater transparency with the vendor performance and usage across the government.

For industry, the schedule framework simplifies engagement as it is fewer duplicate negotiations, and there is a set of terms and conditions rather than dozens of separate agreements across dozens of agencies, and they will be predictable demand signal based on the buying power. And you have a single process reducing administrative burden allowing companies to focus on delivery and innovations.

Multiple Award Schedules are essential to help us deliver scale and structure, and we are not reinventing federal procurement, optimizing what works, and using that platform to modernize how agencies with industries partner to achieve shared outcomes.

This is how we have been successful so far. To date, OneGov has delivered more than 1 billion cumulative savings across participating agreements. We currently have 20 active offers spanning software, cloud, cybersecurity-related technologies, each with established pricing that agencies can access to date. At the same time, we are continuing to expand awareness of adoption. We work closely with CIO, CAO, and acquisition leaders across the CFO agencies, and we are using data to identify where existing contracts are expiring and where there are opportunities to transition in these agreements.

While the numbers are important, the bigger takeaway is these are scaling in terms of adoption and opportunities.

KELLY WHITFIELD: Jaime, I think we’re losing your audio.

JEREMY WUSTNER BROWN: The good news is that he is done, and I will speak right at the microphone. We just lost you for the last few seconds there, Jaime. I think the bulk of it we covered, and what’s faded out, I am about to talk with you about, and it works perfectly. We will get your headphones recharged.

As you can see here, OneGov is already delivering access to a robust and diverse portfolio of software and services from many of the world’s leading technology providers. You can see visual identifiers with the logos there. These are not just brand names; they represent the breadth of IT across the government and types of solutions we are simplifying under OneGov. Within government-wide agencies, they can have access to enterprise software and collaboration tools, including Microsoft, Google, Box, Adobe, email, file storage, productivity suites, customer relationship management software, workflow automation. You have cloud platforms and infrastructure through Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud. These are all foundational agencies and modernization efforts and digital transformation goals.

You have AI where the previous panel discussed that early, but this is how you get at it. AI and large language models and providers like OpenAI, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Anthropic, Claude. These help us ensure and secure standards-based access through commercial generative AI while maintaining control over procurement pricing and usage scope. You have cybersecurity and risk management tools: Palo Alto Networks, Tenable, Broadcom, Elastic, delivering critical capabilities for zero trust architecture, endpoint protection, and vulnerability scaling and secure data management. Digital identity, authentication, ID.me, DocuSign. These help us streamline how agencies verify and deliver paperless workflows.

Emerging tech and developer platforms including Meta, Oracle, ServiceNow, Copilot, and providing tools for software development, digital services, and future-ready infrastructure.

Each of these represents real savings, real simplification, and real speed transmission. Working with government-wide usage in mind, meaning we have done the work up front, and agencies can be faster with less friction. Portfolio will continue to grow as we identify high-value opportunities across government IT demand.

You will see layers and contact information. If a particular solution you are looking for that you don’t see on the list, reach out and let us know. Jaime went through the tiered process we take to identify who we are going to work with next, but the reality is that we find there is a demand across the government, it is an easy lift, and we can make it happen.

What are we learning through all of this? As we have implemented the agreements, we have learned a lot about what works, what doesn’t, where we need to refine the model. And in the early stages, limited time offers (LTO) help drive awareness and adoption, and you saw a cadence of press releases and announcements about this OEM or the OEM coming on the schedule or inking a deal with us, but it showed we can move quickly, generate savings, and operate at scale.

What we see now is a shift focusing less on the number of deals and more long-term values, prioritizing with broad enterprise impacts and using data to guide where we engage. We are moving toward more direct engagement and direct agreements where pricing terms and accountability are established upfront, applying consistently across what we have talked about.

Over time, the expectation is savings will come less from the one-time discount and more from structural inefficiency. Coordinated demand, standardized terms, and reduced duplication. This is an evolving model, and we are taking what we have learned, refining the approach, and building toward something that is more durable, more scalable, and easier for agencies and industries to operate within.

Closing with a few points. I know we covered a lot today, but the core idea is pretty straightforward, and we are making a more coordinated approach bringing demand together, working more directly with OEMs, and establishing consistent pricing across the government, and it is still evolving. We have additional agreements and development today, and we are continuing to refine how this model operates based on feedback both from agencies like yours and our industry partners. If you’re interested in learning more, we have included resources, and that includes the OneGov site, points of contact, and information on upcoming webinars and engagement opportunities.

A few things I want to point out: you see on the right it says OEM LTO webinars, and they originally were with the manufacturer, limited time offer webinars. That link and the slides we shared out, Chris can probably also drop a link in the webinar chat that will direct you to this, but we are actively posting throughout the month of April are OEM partners to come in and talk about their solutions and their perspective. You have heard plenty of AI talk about how this works from us, but maybe you want to learn more specifically about how OpenAI ChatGPT works, what that all means, what you can do with it, et cetera.

We are hosting those all months, and the ones that have already happened, we are actively working to get those uploaded, and CLPs are associated with those that you can log in, and they are about an hour long. You can check that out and learn more about the agreements. We host webinars like this with a longer Q&A section. Today, we only have a few minutes, but we can really get in the weeds with you there following the content.

We have agency office hours, and if you want a more evident event experience with a handful of agencies to come with specific challenges, sign up for those, and we can help you out. If you want to see us in person, the annual summit is coming up on Wednesday, May 6, if you have an opportunity to register for that.

Contact information is here, so feel free to reach out to us with questions.

Speaking of which, we have a few minutes. Can I just jump right in?

KELLY WHITFIELD: Absolutely. If you see a question you really want to address, we have about four minutes.

OneGov Q&A

JEREMY WUSTNER BROWN: I will go in order. Kenneth, I don’t know if this is similar to SBIR. I have heard the term, and I won’t claim expertise in it. I don’t know how familiar you are. We will get back to you on that one.

The OneGov strategy promotes the government paying the same price across agencies. Can you explain this further? We may have gotten into this in more detail after you submitted your question. The GSA negotiates a fair and reasonable price, but how do you prevent the vendor from giving agencies different discounts with a past order of level? The idea is we get them onto the Multiple Award Schedule, and they all have that just an advantage, and those are set. And if an agency wants to negotiate further, we are not going to stop them, but we are working closely to make sure the pricing is consistent on multiple casuals with the agencies looking to leverage it.

It extends to our friendly competition outside of GSA as we have seen “a rising tide raises all boats,” and a lot of other innovative pricing is picked up by others, which we love to see.

As the opportunity of using one debit strategy under MAS increases, do you have any thoughts on how procurement offices should address situations where a single distributor effectively controls access to certain IT products? Maybe you are talking about lock-in. Business model impacts procurement/acquisition efforts to achieve meaningful competition among resellers? It is an astute observation. We have talked a lot today about how we are working with OEM to get them on contract, and that is easier said than done and does not always happen overnight. Many, if not most, of the initial OneGov, are actually through value-added resellers.

As we work to get them directly onto the Multiple Award Schedule, the idea is the pricing is consistent from that through all of those resellers.

That’s the same question.

Maybe this is the last one, many commercial products. In the past there were strong drives to go to open source products with cheaper alternatives such as open search. Does your approach reflect change in the direction? The idea is that at GSA, we are to meet agencies where you are in the process. The ID.me is a good example of that. We have login.gov, and if that meets your needs as an agency customer, we encourage you to go through that, and we will help you with that. If ID.me happens to meet your needs better, we can go that route as well. Open source versus commercial solutions, the idea is to get to the solutions you need as quickly as possible at the best pricing possible.

I will hand it back to Kelly.

KELLY WHITFIELD: Those were all of the questions. Thank you. We got through the Q&A. Look at us go.

Great job, just a really big thank you to Jeremy and Jaime. This was great information, and this was a short class at 30 minutes. That was excellent, and I appreciate both of you. Let’s keep going. I put the survey in the chat. If you have been with us, you know the drill, and if you want to give feedback, go to the survey link, and you can give feedback.

Okay. Let’s keep going. Our final session today is master GO.gov and sleep for shared services. I am going to go ahead and pass it over to our wonderful presenters for this class, Carolyn and Stephanie. Thank you for joining us. Go ahead.

Master GO.gov and Fleet for shared services

CAROLYN MEZA: Thank you. So happy to be here. Stephanie and I will split the presentation, and I will talk with you about GO.gov. I am Carolyn, acting Executive Director for Travel, Transportation, and Employee Relations, and we are all anxiously working on building the government’s next travel system. What is GO.gov? For anyone who has traveled in government today, you are familiar with a GSA product called E2 Solutions. GO.gov will replace all of the systems for the federal government. The government supports 124 different civilian agencies through a patchwork of two different systems. Every agency has had this system and configured the system, paid for it, maintained it, set up different policies, and that resulted in about 8,000 government staff serving as system administrators across the government.

GO.gov will consolidate all government travel for federal in one system. For the first time ever, we will have one system covering an entire workstream of the travel and expense and government-wide recording and security. It is a huge thing to get to where we have gotten to today. We have been working with all agencies since 2018 to standardize the elements that travel and expenses that would need an integrated that in the federal integrated framework. Because of the collaboration, we can buy once. When you move on to the new system, you will not be buying anything.

GSA is upfront and paid for the system and is configuring it for you, and you will repay the government for it by use of a voucher; it is a by-the-drink model. GO.gov will handle your booking, your approvals, your expense and vouchers, and integrate with the TMC and provide enhanced security for the TMC that is Travel Management Center or companies, and think of them as a travel agent behind the scenes. Whether Google Flights, Concur, you have to have this behind the scenes. We will integrate with those agencies and provide an extra layer of security.

We will have all government-wide data in one system for the first time ever, and that is really huge so we can see it across the government who is traveling where we can leverage the information to enhance the GO.gov across the travel, city payers, flight, rental car programs.

It is not just a new system. Every 10 or 15 years we roll out a new travel system, and this is different. That we will all be on the same thing.

What is different? Right now, agencies buy their own travel system and configure it. There is a lot of work you have to provide as an agency whether helpdesk, operations and maintenance, support needs. That will all fall on GSA, and you will have input in it through a robust governance structure, that you will be able to take advantage of the government buy-in. We will be able to get more for our money going forward because we will all be in one place.

When the system evolves, we will all see the system enhancements once and across the board.

You may be asking when am I getting the system? We have three agencies with GSA; we have a small Department of Treasury, Bureau of Fiscal Services, and DHS with the training services. They went live in January, and we have learned a lot from the onboarding, and we have a phased approach. Every agency, all 124, are assigned an MOU with GSA or in the process to commit to the onboarding day. We will see two big parts of onboarding in August and November of this year as well as a series of waves of onboarding throughout the spring of 2027, and that is going to come with a lot of change management activities, a lot of cleanup agencies will have to do. We will not be transferring the old system in the new, but we will be launching everybody fresh.

Let me give you a quick preview of some of the things we should expect to see different when you onboard. We are going to try to make it easy for the government to save money. We are making it really easy for users to be compliant and choose the right hotels, use the right flights that save government money, and provide all of the benefits the government gets when they use the government-wide program. Things like federal rooms will go to the top, and it will be easy to get these rates when searching for flights.

It is fully supported, and when there are changes to the FTR, Federal Travel Regulation, we can implement that across the government to make sure all travelers are fully compliant.

The next thing you will notice is it is a cleaner interface. About half the agencies, you are using a tool called Concur.gov, and there will not be a lot of change as we are moving to a different version of Concur, but it is the version all Fortune 500 companies use today. It is cleaner and easier to use and easier to see what you need to do. There are less obscure government terms, and our system will now get updated when the rest of the commercial world gets upgraded.

For the first time ever, we will have a cool mobile app. By the agencies going live in August, you will be able to approve trips right from their phone, which will really cut down on time and stress when you are trying to get trips approved over the weekend. You will be able to capture your receipt whether on the go, you can take a picture flowing in the queue of things you need assigned to the expense report, and it should improve the user experience and bring the government in as we are using more commercial tools, what the rest of the commercial world has to offer.

We are integrating with the SmartPay charge card. When you use your SmartPay card for travel, as you should to follow policy most of the time, that is going to flow in your expense reports so all you have to do is assign the expenses. We have integrations with our clients and hotel partners so your receipt will flow in and automatically do the task of assigning out the taxes and the lodging fees that you don’t have to break that down yourself. It should be a real time-saver.

It will also capture so you have the personal government card account and will capture all spending you make on your centralized billing account, and that is where the agencies are using that to buy their airfares, and that should save some time there as well.

There is another change we are hopeful agencies who will save users. When you go in, if you build your request to go travel, you have to put in everything you can think of. You put in your airfare, hotel, rental car, your ride to the hotel, baggage, it’s hard to remember all of that. We work with the Office of Government-wide Policy to come up with a nice way around this to save time for the traveler called the 30% grossed up. You just have to put in your hotel and your per diem, where you will be and your airfare, and we will add 30% on top of that. When you do your voucher, you will true up, but you don’t have to do that before you take your trip.

Before I close, I want to talk about how this program will support the rest of the programs that we do in travel and transportation. One is rideshare. I don’t know if anyone has heard about that, but we have a great deal with Uber where we are negotiating discounts across the government for every time you use Uber. As federal employees, you get access to Uber One for two years for free as part of your signing up and linking your government account. This is all legal and a completely legitimate program, so I can assess we do get a lot of great benefits whether traveling for work or using it in personal capacity. This is the program with integration in this so you can find the most cost-effective seat to use and be able to stay compliant with all of the policies we have around flying, but get to where you need to go after the lodging program. This is integrated in this and is easier to pick the property when you are traveling, and that is important because up to 4:00 p.m. cancellation, free Internet, no resort fees, and there is a bunch that comes with it.

You cannot get canceled.

I am excited to see all of you and our travel system when it comes your turn, and really hoping that the onboarding experience goes well for you, and I’m here for questions.

KELLY WHITFIELD: We have a few. Amy asked, will GO.gov replace DTS?

CAROLYN MEZA: No, not at this time. It is who we are rolling this out to right now.

KELLY WHITFIELD: We had a couple in there on that. When is the estimated time for transition to GO.gov?

CAROLYN MEZA: Depends on the agency. Every agency will be off of the current travel system by May or April at the latest of next year, and it depends on when the agency is signed up to onboard.

KELLY WHITFIELD: When speaking of that, do you happen to know if the Army is onboard?

CAROLYN MEZA: It is part of DOW, so they will continue with DTS.

KELLY WHITFIELD: They are moving quickly. Is it clear which features can be used for personal use?

CAROLYN MEZA: You will have access if you sign up, basically link your work account with the personal account, and you have access to all of that.

KELLY WHITFIELD: Several questions. If you want to know when the agency is doing it, is there any list or somewhere to find out when they are transitioning?

CAROLYN MEZA: We have a lot of information out, but I will get back to you.

KELLY WHITFIELD: People want more training. They are asking to see more about it. They are wanting to see more detailed run-throughs of the system.

Here is a question. Suppose that the 30% is not enough. Will travelers have to amend as they do now?

CAROLYN MEZA: Amendments are with the government process, and there are no amendments in the new system. We could do multiple vouchers, but you do not amend the request anymore. The 30% right now, we are using out within 30 agencies onboarding, and we are making sure that is enough. All of the data to date, it is at 33% that is enough, but we want to make sure it is enough. We are capping it at 34 now, and we will continue to evaluate and adjust.

KELLY WHITFIELD: Okay. We had a couple of questions about the Fed rates and Uber One and if they are available for personal use.

CAROLYN MEZA: Uber One, absolutely available for personal use. Sign up today as it is really easy. You can go to GSA.gov/rideshare to get there, but bedroom, I also miss the old bedroom where you can go and both personal use, and that is not there today. We are looking at various options, but as of right now, that is not something that we have.

KELLY WHITFIELD: Okay. I will do one more question, but I want to transition as we still have another part of this. What do you need to do at the end of the two-year period for Uber?

CAROLYN MEZA: You would probably have to start paying for it.

KELLY WHITFIELD: Okay. A lot of good questions coming in, and we will come back to questions, but I want to go ahead and turn it over to Stephanie. Thank you, Carolyn, so much.

STEPHANIE GRESALFI: Thank you for that presentation. (audio is bad)

KELLY WHITFIELD: Stephanie, your audio is a little garbled, and you are hard to understand. Your audio is still very garbled. If you have to leave and rejoin or if you could switch your microphone.

It’s a practice run; it was coming through fine.

JONATHAN DIPASQUALE: I can jump in for her while she tries to get squared away. This talks about the GSA fleet as a shared service. It is a huge priority for the administration currently. Looking to the shared services as closely as we possibly can. The GSA fleet is an opportunity for that, and consolidation is an opportunity for our current leasing partners and for those who are not leasing to utilize the GSA fleet to the fullest extent.

As I said, it is centralizing management and taking up the administrative work. I will go through this quickly. Essentially, reducing burden, reducing redundancy. Say you do a lot of that centralization, things we can do at scale over the entire portfolio of vehicles rather than having agency do it. We can do it a little more efficiently and do it over a larger number than taking the admin in a way and the ability to move on and manage the fleet.

We also are able to give flexibility because of the fleet size, but you are not afforded on your own. It allows you to focus on what your core mission is as we have a dedicated fleet, a professional set up with that is all we do. That is our mission so you can work on what you are worried about is your mission. What we offer, we are the mandatory service for the purchasing bagels. We are just getting the economies of scale to push through, getting the best price possible, and I am talking about the leasing program and something offered with the value at in funding these every 7, 8 or 9 years and smooths the budget process out, and we offer additional services as well.

Short-term rental for the vehicles that are needed on those. That can be procured through this short-term program. Those are the three pillars of what it offers.

Consolidation is what we are focused on as it is a big priority of the administration and working in coordination with the large majority of agencies and the vehicles to look at the cost they are paying for their vehicles, and it has that been determined that it is a significant value to the agencies, and we are a low-cost provider for that. In the process, they take ownership of the asset during the transfer, and BLA began providing the full sweep of support for the GSA fleet, and this is replacing their vehicles. We get in the replacement cycle. This is about double. Significantly over a lot more downtime, the costs are difficult to quantify; that downtime is a big concern that we have with the agency.

Bringing it to the program, operating off our replacement cycle that is a lot more secure, and if you are relying on budgets every year.

The benefits, we handle everything. That is the goal. This is the disposal, standardizing it throughout the entire life with maintenance and accidents. We have a maintenance control center, so you have the students advocating on behalf of the driver to get vehicle maintenance done rather than having an individual driver going to a body shop. We have trained techs authorized to negotiate, so this is the onset coming back to the agency, and this behooves us to operate in the most efficient manner possible, and modernized lifecycle is huge. The vehicles are half the age, and you can see this moves very quickly. Those types of things you start realizing the benefits of the vehicle getting you enter a brand new vehicle, and we start to see how much this comes in a short period of time. Lastly, the financial side, there is no upfront cost or capital outlay, it is a predictable budget, and this is to keep it as steady as possible, and we do this year every year, and we reevaluate year over year. This provides you a long-term benefit and predictable budget going forward so you don’t have the outlay.

All of the data needed for reporting and getting those as efficiently as possible.

This is what we do, just showing you how widespread we are as we do a lot of different missions. We have a robust law enforcement program, we do maintenance, we have Army Corps of Engineers, and there are many different representations what we can provide to the customers. Law enforcement has been a huge priority in recent years, and we offer turnkey solutions fully output to the leasing customers.

The goal is to operate the demand and get those directly from the manufacturers versus having it done after the fact that is more downtime and potential for concerns with reliability down the road. This shows everything we are able to do. We have support to order support, runway support, and ambulances and large equipment on the program.

Some numbers, I mention a lot of this, but to show you again, overall savings is about a 20% increase in cost, and this is self-reported savings from agency-owned or agencies who owned vehicles versus what they lease is 20% cheaper on the leasing side, and on the commercial side there is a huge savings that is very few instances where the commercial should be considered. GSA Fleet or short-term is the way to go in those instances.

The age, we have age, and our goal is to cycle the vehicles out and the most appropriate time based on the value to get on the backside, so we are always monitoring that in average cost is about $0.23. Comparable to what you would see on your POV if driving and getting reimbursed as you know that is higher and is very comparable or very low cost per mile.

Lastly, our contact information. I wanted to get that out there. Any questions that you have, you will have access to this, but we want to talk with you. There is a lot of things that go in the decision-making process, and we understand that. We would be happy to talk. I see a lot about OCUNUS. Those are the kinds of questions if you bring them to us directly, we can address that more specifically to let you know what we can offer.

It could be anything from a full-service lease to a more pared-down lease depending on where you are, but we do operate that.

KELLY WHITFIELD: Okay.

JONATHAN DIPASQUALE: You’re still really garbled.

KELLY WHITFIELD: The audio is still really rough. Okay. We are coming up on 3:00 anyway. I just want to go ahead and say a huge thank you to all of you, thank you so much to John, thank you to Stephanie. Sorry about the audio issues. Thank you so much to Carolyn. This was great. All of the information, and a lot of exciting things going on.

We will capture the Q&A to follow up with you. A big thank you to everyone. I’m going to put the survey in the chat one more time if you want to provide feedback. You have been a wonderful audience. Thank you again, and we have had so many great presenters, and I hope you will join us again tomorrow for another full day of training sessions. Other than that, stay safe and be kind to one another.

John or Carolyn, any final thoughts or comments? Thank you both so much. Tamika, did I forget anything?

TAMIKA COLEMAN: No, I think you covered it all. This was great. Every session was definitely enjoyable and informational. Thank you.

KELLY WHITFIELD: Thank you to everyone. We had a great audience. I love to see the images in the chat, so many good questions. It has been wonderful to see all of the engagement.

We look forward to tomorrow. Hopefully, we will see you then.