GSA is Opening up eBuy
The General Services Administration announced today it has kicked-off a pilot program designed to assess possible benefits to the federal government, and the federal contracting industry, of making public the information that is currently accessible only via the GSA eBuy portal.
Per their press release:
The one-year eBuy Open GSA First pilot tests the hypothesis that by GSA publicly posting eBuy awards, vendors who do not hold a GSA contract will be better positioned to decide if they want to pursue a GSA contract or subcontracting opportunities.
In short, GSA has started listening to what open data advocates (including GovTribe) have been saying for years now. Both the government and the contracting industry will be better served if the high volume of GSA schedule procurement activity were more transparent.
The bottom line is that, beginning today (October 17, 2018), GSA will begin to post award notices, along with the original request for quote (RFQ), to FBO.gov for procurements that take place under most of the GSA Federal Supply Schedules. This information will be mined in real time and added to GovTribe as Federal Contract Opportunities, and linked to Contract Awards and Contract IDVs whenever possible.
There are limitations to this pilot program, of course. The most glaring is that GSA will NOT yet be posting GSA eBuy opportunities to FBO prior to award. So it will still not be possible to track current open-for-bid GSA schedule opportunities anywhere but on eBuy. GSA explains the logic of this on their Questions and Answers page, which I encourage you to read in full:
Since providing pre-award transparency is not the current practice, GSA must first understand the benefits and unintended consequences of increasing transparency upon eBuy’s competition and usage rates before increasing transparency to include pre-award RFQs.
…two of the GSA Administrator’s priorities are increasing transparency and competition. When contracting officers use eBuy to request quotes, on average they receive more quotes than if they used a different approach. When increasing transparency, GSA must consider the effects of increased transparency upon eBuy usage. This pilot looks to increase transparency without impacting competition.
While frustrating in its limited nature, this pilot program represents important progress in opening up the largest limited competition procurement portal operated by the federal government. Industry should now have much more insight into the products and services being procured under schedule and the associated points-of-contact, without the headaches of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
What You Can Do
GSA will use the results of this pilot to determine if they should further open up eBuy. That decision will be made in early FY 2020.
If you agree that they should, then start making use of the new information that will now be available. Search for Federal Contract Opportunities with the keyword “eBuyPilot” in the title on GovTribe. Based on the initial test notice that they have posted, it looks like they’re going to embed a feedback survey link on each eBuy notice that goes up on FBO. Please make use of that to let GSA know what you think (once there is real data to assess, of course).
Stay tuned for more updates from us on this!
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