Keeping Up With Procurement

HEADNOTE

VIEWPOINT

HEADNOTE

By any count, government has too few acquisition pros.

By now, it should be obvious that the federal

government lacks a sufficient acquisition workforce to obtain the best value for the money it spends on goods and services. One clear sign came in early 2005, when the congressionally mandated Acquisition Advisory Panel, made up of experts from the public and private sectors, called for study of the workforce. David Drabkin, deputy chief acquisition officer at the General Services Administration, says the panel did the right thing: "Reforms . . . cannot achieve their potential absent a workforce that is both appropriately qualified and sufficiently numerous to implement the reforms."

But the solution is tough to find without determining the extent of the problem. It's difficult to figure out who performs the broad range of acquisition-related functions needed to buy $350 billion in goods, services and construction each year governmentwide. The discussion is constrained by two definitions of the workforce that grew out of the Defense Department's counting methods. The Acquisition Organization methodology counts employees at about two dozen Defense agencies, regardless of actual occupations. The Refined Packard model counts civilian and military personnel in certain procurement occupations, and military officers under the 1990 Defense Acquisition Workforce Improvement Act. Neither approach is particularly effective.