In GSA’s FY22-FY26 Strategic Plan, FAS is a leading office for ensuring GSA’s portfolio of offerings meets market demand for products, services, and solutions and the desired acquisition approaches; and assists the administration in meeting a majority of its goals.
FAS connects to several of the current administration’s priorities and is always on its radar. Making it easier for small businesses to succeed, promoting sustainability, increasing government transparency, saving taxpayer money, and increasing efficiency are all FAS goals that align with the current administration.
In GSA’s FY23 Congressional Justification, FAS seeks to address two primary areas:
1. Consolidate FAS’ acquisition vehicles to improve the federal marketplace.
The Federal Marketplace (FMP) Strategy is GSA’s plan to modernize the buying and selling experience for customers, suppliers, and acquisition professionals alike. It began as four projects:
- MAS Consolidations
- Catalog Management
- Commercial Platforms
- Contract Acquisition Life-cycle Management (CALM) system
Some of FMP’s recent improvements include updating the MAS Roadmap to include instructions and templates for prospective suppliers looking to get on GSA schedules; adding a checklist and self-help modules for buyers building an acquisition package; offering an online application for the VPP; and adding status indicators on GSA Advantage to let customers know if a product has limited or no stock instead of supply chain disruptions.
2. Address climate change by investing in zero-emission vehicles and continue incorporating sustainability and climate risk management into the acquisition process.
FAS is currently involved in GSA’s Environmental Justice Working Group (EJWB) and is investing in the federal government’s capacity to manage climate change risks by 2025. Since FAS heavily supports agency demands for products and services that pose climate risks, FAS is working to develop a decision diagram detailing where climate risk management needs to be considered during the acquisition process. The audience for this diagram will be the GSA acquisition workforce, and this will become a part of GSA’s overall climate literacy efforts. Furthermore, the FAS Commissioner addresses the climate crisis through zero-emission fleet vehicles at GSA.
As covered in FAS in Action above, FAS always tackles multiple initiatives that cover much ground. Other movements in the fiscal years to come to include:
- Emerging Technology: ITC is developing an Emerging Technology strategy that aims to position GSA as a leader in enabling agencies to raise awareness of and more readily utilize emerging technologies. ITC will do so by looking at data on leading-edge technologies from proposals submitted during the solicitation period. It is also considering Other Transaction Authority (OTA) utilization.
- Payment Audits: The Personal Property Utilization and Donation Program request $10.75M, a $1.33M increase from FY22. The Transportation Audits program, within the TTL portfolio, requests $12.05M to focus on prepayment oversight and post-payment audits of government-wide transportation bills and recoveries of overcharges.
- Expand Organizational Capabilities. FAS is working to develop new organizational capabilities to understand customer demand and deliver integrated offerings to support collaborative business processes Government-wide.
- Technology Modernization. As mentioned above, FAS is working to increase government-wide adoption of shared technology solutions that improve digital governance, sharing, security, and interoperability.
