GSA's New Plan May Mean 'Parallel Contracting Universes'
The U.S. General Services Administration’s pending plan to allow commercial off-the-shelf purchases through an e-commerce portal effectively undermines another effort to streamline its biggest acquisition program, to the point experts say the latter program may be in jeopardy.
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“The feedback I’m getting, and my read on all this, is the schedule consolidation is great; long overdue. I wish they had started this years earlier,” Blank Rome LLP attorney Merle DeLancey said.
But the GSA’s upcoming five-year pilot program for the so-called Section 846 e-marketplace could nonetheless make the schedule consolidation like “rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic,” according to DeLancey, whose practice includes both schedule and commercial item contracting.
“It’s so opposite, antithetical to the Schedules,” DeLancey said. “Whatever e-marketplace provider there is, I presume it’s going to be easier and faster to add products to that than it will be a GSA schedule. I’ve got to think this is slowly going to kill the Schedules.”
"GSA's New Plan May Mean 'Parallel Contracting Universes'," by Daniel Wilson was published in Law360 on August 7, 2019.