The Department of Housing and Urban Development is the third agency to move its contracting for common goods and services to the General Services Administration.
HUD joined the Office of Personnel Management and the Small Business Administration in using GSA’s Office of Centralized Acquisition Services for buying things like IT services, office management or medical supplies under the category management initiative.
“We’ve been on a journey to design a scalable, efficient acquisition structure that consolidates the procurement of common goods and services across government at the enterprise level. What does this mean? It means that we’re going to be leveraging our multiple award schedules, our governmentwide acquisition contracts (GWACs) and shared services as the backbone of federal procurement,” said Tom Meiron, the assistant commissioner for OCAS, at a Federal Acquisition Service town hall on Wednesday, a recording of which Federal News Network obtained. “We’ll be consolidating spend across governmentwide categories and moving to eliminate duplicative contracts. “We’ll be driving efficiencies by phasing out redundant contracts and leaning into shared services, integrating policy and common support functions. OCAS is delivering on this vision by shifting common contract workload away from agencies so that they can focus primarily on their mission-specific, complex requirements that support their agencies.”
GSA says the initial pilots with OPM and SBA are already showing promise.
Laura Stanton, the deputy commissioner of FAS, said GSA’s efforts to buy common goods and services for OPM and SBA are 37% more efficient than what the agencies did on their own.
Since March, GSA is managing more than 908 contracts worth $1.5 billion from OPM and SBA. OCAS now includes more than 120 contracting officers.
“We’ve achieved $6.5 million in savings through increased visibility and reduced software license and support services spent. How did we do that? $5.3 million came from optimizing Microsoft licenses for SBA, and another $1.2 million came from eliminating unneeded services,” Meiron said. “Before the transfer of the contracts to OCAS for support, OPM and SBA used GSA vehicles less than 30% of the time for their requirements, and used best-in-class contracts and GWACs less than 20%. Post transfers, 75% of those requirements now run through our schedules and our GWACs.”
GSA set up OCAS over the last several months in response to President Donald Trump’s executive order from March to consolidate the buying of common goods and services. The Office of Management and Budget followed up with a memo in June, telling agencies to increase the use of centralized contracts managed by GSA and to centralize procurement functions at GSA when it “promotes greater economy and efficiency.”
“Use of GSA’s best-in-class contracts (BICs) and other governmentwide contracts has produced significant savings and cost avoidance, including an average savings rate of 38% for certain types of IT hardware and savings of $150 million in fiscal 2024 for identity protection services,” OMB stated in the memo. “Despite GSA’s successes, less than 20% of common spend currently goes through GSA.”
Source: OMB June 2025 memo.
As part of that executive order, GSA created OCAS and submitted a procurement consolidation plan to OMB.
Meiron said that GSA is waiting for OMB’s approval to finalize the standup of OCAS.
“We need to complete our contract transitions for the remaining pilot agencies and validate a repeatable model to expand across more agencies,” he said. “We will continue our agency engagement, explaining our processes, sharing lessons learned, listening to their feedback and fielding all of their queries. We will also continue to pilot artificial intelligence and automation solutions to help manage our capacity constraints and speed up our acquisition timelines.”
The future design of OCAS includes six functional offices to focus on operations, acquisition delivery, acquisition talent, compliance, customer engagement and program performance.
“This is a significant change, not just for FAS, but for the entire federal procurement ecosystem. We’re building the structure, the workforce and the tools to deliver centralized acquisition at scale together,” he said. “We’re shaping how the government buys common goods and services for the years to come. We’re saving taxpayer dollars, reducing duplication and we’re enabling agencies to focus on where it matters most, the crucial components of their mission.”
GO.gov is a go in November
Along those same consolidation lines, GSA also said its new travel management system, called GO.gov, is expected to go live with its first set of agency customers in November.
GSA awarded IBM a 15-year, $930.5 million contract in November and renamed the platform GO.gov in July.
GSA says that GO.gov is expected to save up to $131 million in related travel savings annually, and approximately $2 billion in administrative efficiencies over the life of the contract, by driving use of government-negotiated discounts.
Christina Kingsland, FAS’s assistant commissioner for the Office of Travel, Transportation and Logistics, said they are on track to implement GO.gov across all civilian agencies by the spring of 2027, well ahead of when the current E-Gov Travel Service 2 contract expires in December of that year.
“The first agencies, including GSA, go live in November,” Kingsland said. “We have signed memorandums of understanding from every agency. That commits them to the dates, and which tranche they are going to be onboarding, so that’ll keep us on track. We have a phased approach to onboard all of the agencies into the system before that contract expires. Initial operating capability agencies go first, not quite the full operating capability, so what you will see as a GSA employee will look different in the future.”
Along with GSA, Kingsland said the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC) will also be in the first set of agencies moving to GO.gov.
She said the transition path for all agencies will include milestones along the way, including preparation and testing of the new system, closeout of the old one and ensuring that integration runs smoothly.
“The e-gov travel team is beginning to engage with agencies on a weekly basis about one year before their scheduled deployment date. And then about six months before, the technical configuration work with IBM, who manages the back end for GO.gov, starts,” she said. “Each agency is working through a project plan with some flexibility to customize their own critical milestones. But, of course, change management and the communication-related work is absolutely critical, and runs throughout the entire transition.”
The post HUD joining GSA centralized acquisition services pilot first appeared on Federal News Network.