What's So Hard?

Performance-based contracting still baffles agencies By Jason Miller, GCN Staff Performance-based contracting still befuddles federal agencies. And industry isn’t much better either, according to a panel of procurement experts.

“The biggest impact of performance-based contracting has been confusion,” said Mike Sade, the Commerce Department’s senior procurement executive, at a lunch in Washington sponsored by the Young Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association’s Bethesda, Md., chapter. “Performance-based contracting raised three questions: What does the government really want? What were they thinking when they wrote the requirements? And how will they pick the winner with all the different solutions that vendors propose?” (GCN)

As a former government contractor, this just screams at me. As an IT worker, this just smacks of stupidity.

Also from the article:

"Joann Underwood, a contracting officer with the Army Contracting Agency, said the government is forced to determine what problem they want to solve and they are not very good at that. "

Anyone who has been a government contractor could have told you that. The Federal Government of the United States does a very poor job at defining the problems its programs are trying to solve. A running joke is there is no such thing as a failed pilot because it will eventually solve someone's problem This should not make the average taxpayer feel warm and fuzzy however because these are your dollars being wasted.

Let us look at a very simple issue. Documenting employees. The Federal Government has more than a dozen cabinet-level agencies, with dozens of other "administrations" that are not official part of these agencies. How many different forms of identification cards do you think there are for each agency for just their permanent employees. If you said one, you would be wrong. Even in the District of Columbia, each agency can have as many as three different ID cards. When you start talking about the nation, each city can have its own. How much does it cost to produce these individual ID cards? While this is a trivial example, it is only representative of some of the more wasteful spending decisions that the government has made over time. And you wonder why the deficit keeps rising?