What’s it like to spend literally decades trying to understand, decode and interpret a federal agency and then joining it at the executive level? Larry Allen spent years as a federal sales and marketing consultant after a stint as president of the Coalition for Government Procurement. He was also a regular guest on Federal Drive with Tom Temin. Last month he joined the General Services Administration as associate administrator for the Office of Governmentwide Policy.
Interview transcript:
Tom Temin And let’s begin with a review of the Office of Governmentwide Policy. This has waxed and waned over the years. What does it do and what do they expect you to do in it?
Larry Allen Tom, I think the best way to describe the Office of Governmentwide Policy in GSA is that it’s the field army for the Office of Management and Budget in many ways. This office is a very outward-facing office, if you’re facing the Office of Management and Budget. So we provide support for them, whether it’s on acquisition policy, whether it is on travel rules, whether it’s even the Federal Advisory Commission support. That all comes out of this office. But the office also does lots of neat things that I didn’t fully realize when I came in here. Like we maintain Acquisition.gov. We set the federal per diem. We even, Tom, set the Federal Aviation Rules for aircraft that federal agencies own as part of the GSA fleet management portfolio. I’ve taken to calling it Fleet in the Air.
Tom Temin Right, but that doesn’t mean you get a helicopter or anything for your job.
Larry Allen Tragically, no.
Tom Temin All right, and so basically then in many ways, and we’ve seen this over successive administrations that want to carry out a governmentwide policy, they in effect use or even you might say contract with the GSA to actually do the operational end of that policy.
Larry Allen That’s right, and that’s a lot of what we’re up to now. We’re talking about acquisition consolidation as one of the main issues, and that would certainly expand GSA’s role in common use acquisition. So the opposite of governmentwide policy, a key part of that is obviously acquisition policy. So we are working very closely with the Federal Acquisition Service on how to set that up, how to integrate the acquisition professionals, things of that nature. To make sure if we do this, the GSA actually performs as expected by customer agencies and by its contractor partners. It’s never a dull moment here, Tom.
Tom Temin Yeah, this idea of reconsolidating procurement into GSA reminds some of us very old timers of the Brooks Act returning, even though the Brooks Act was overturned 30 years ago by new legislation. But is that what’s going on? And how are you planning for that? And do we know the contours of how that will look yet?
Larry Allen Tom, we have no plans to re-institute the Brooks IT Act, either in form or substance. But what we do want to do is we want to make the government a more efficient buyer. We want to reduce redundancies. Does everybody need to be buying common use IT, for example? Why can’t GSA buy common use IT for other agencies? GSA already does a lot of the furniture contracting, for example, for agencies, as well as professional services. So if we’re doing the contracting, can we do a little bit more of the buying, whether it’s software or a renewable service, things like that, where agencies can then use their existing resources to meet their core missions while GSA is providing the acquisition mission for them.
Tom Temin And how does that map across, say, activities in category management?
Larry Allen Well, I think category management is going to be a key part of what we do in terms of acquisition centralization, looking at what the contract portfolio is today. Is the contract portfolio that we have the right size? Does it need to be streamlined? What are the contract methods that are relied upon by our customer agencies? What are they features that they have? Not just what’s the scope, but how do agencies buy from those contracts? Those are all things we’re going to have to look at as part of the acquisition consolidation process, but it’s absolutely going to be something that is a vital part of the work that we’re doing. But it may or may not look the same when we’re finished at the end, but we are going to take a good, hard look at it.
Tom Temin We’re speaking with Larry Allen, he’s associate administrator for the Office of Government-Wide Policy at the General Services Administration. And the other question related to that consolidation, and this is a perennial, and especially with category management, is the small business question, because presumably you would have some say in the policy with respect to small business utilization also.
Larry Allen Well, as you know Tom, small business use in government acquisition, in particular, is a very important issue. GSA takes its small business commitment seriously. We also promote programs like the 8A STARS program for small businesses who want to sell IT solutions to the government. Whatever we do here to consolidate acquisition and lower acquisition overhead, we’re going to have to keep some key constituencies in mind. One of those is going to be small businesses. Another, for example, is going be veterans. There are a couple of others, but particularly in the small businesses, we know that they are the ones that typically bring a lot of innovative solutions to market. So how do you attract the ones that don’t do business with the government today? So one thing we’re doing is looking at lowering the platform, lowering the barriers to market entry by reforming the acquisition rule. And encouraging small businesses to come and bring their innovative solutions in. So it’s not just making sure that we’re treating our existing small business contractors fairly, which we are definitely gonna do. It’s attracting those non-traditional small businesses that haven’t done business with the government and making the market for the government more attractive to those companies.
Tom Temin All right, and then you mentioned a couple of the silos that the GSA is involved with, IT acquisition and fleet. The third one would be maybe the Public Building Service and its operations. So in your work, who do you interact with or how do you do interact with those groups a lot? And I imagine you also must have a lot of interaction with the White House and OMB.
Larry Allen Tom, that’s right on both fronts. First, we do work very closely with the Public Building Service. The Office of Governmentwide Policy sets up federal building policy, federal management property policy, and federal disposal policy. So we work very close with the public building service on a daily basis. We also work with the Office of Management and Budget. It’s kind of interesting to me to see. We had a group of people that I was involved with last week walking over to have a meeting with the Office of Management and Budget as I saw a couple of other people from my office walking back from an OMB meeting they had just had with their counterparts. So it’s that type of integrated relationship. We’re here to serve OMB. We want to make sure that whatever the changes are that we are there to answer them when the phone rings.
Tom Temin Well, it’s such a short distance you can also you can almost have a tin can telephone between you. It’s only, what, two blocks from GSA headquarters? Are you gonna stay where GSA has traditionally been: 18 F Street?
Larry Allen Well, I don’t know exactly what the long-term plans are. You hear different things. I think we’ll be here at least for the short-term. Where we go after that, there’s a lot that the public building service has to decide on. I’m not sure that GSA is at the top of that list, but that’s certainly something that will be reviewed in due course.
Tom Temin All right, and let me ask you this: As someone who … I don’t think it would be right to say you were a critic of GSA. You were an observer and you pointed out its strengths and where you thought that you had differences with it over the years for sure. What’s it like to now be on the inside after what, 30 years of being an external observer and interpreter of acquisition and acquisition policy?
Larry Allen Tom, it’s really tremendous. I took this position with the hope that I’d be able to work on some things that are really important, commented on from outside the agency over the years. A lot of that’s around acquisition policy, as you know. It’s fabulous to be able to be in the building and work with the professionals inside the agency on those projects, as well as some others that fall under OGP’s purview. I’m even starting to talk the lingo now, as you can tell. It’s definitely a different perspective, but it’s funny at just how much really does pull across from industry into government. Everybody wants to make sure that we’re serving customer agencies. Everybody wants to make sure we’re driving good deals for the taxpayer. So there are a lot of commonalities and it really is something that I’m finding exciting and really enjoying working with my colleagues.
Tom Temin Well, I’ve enjoyed working with you. This will be the last interview you and I have, well, because I’m leaving the Federal Drive for the next phase of my life. But I just want to say it’s been great having these interviews, and I wish you luck in the new job.
Larry Allen Tom, I appreciate it. I wish you the best too, and I just want you to remember that very few people are fortunate enough to achieve escape velocity from government contracting. So I suspect we’ll be back around again.
Tom Temin I’m afraid we will. Or, actually, I’m anticipating happily that we will.
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