Rearranging the Deck Chairs: GSA to Take Over Purchasing "Common Goods and Services"

In the midst of all the controversial Executive Orders and tariff announcements, President Trump signed an Executive Order entitled “Eliminating Waste and Saving Taxpayer Dollars by Consolidating Procurement” (“EO”). Issued on March 20, 2025, the EO’s main purpose is to transfer the purchasing of “common goods and services” from across the Government to the General Services Administration (“GSA”).

The EO appears to be an effort to force the use (as opposed to the stduying) of “category management” practices to achieve greater efficiency in federal procurement. This concept has been studied (with any eye towards implementation) by the Category Management Leadership Council (“CMLC”), an entity established as such in 2014 during the Obama Administration. As defined by GSA, “category management is the practice of buying common goods and services as an organized enterprise in order to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of acquisition activities.” Within the Government, “this means buying like an enterprise to get more value and savings by identifying core areas (categories of spend), using data to consolidate and reduce contracts when possible, better managing suppliers and demand, and reducing the total cost of ownership.” In 2015, the CMLC identified 10 categories of “common goods and services” referred to in President Trump’s EO.

The EO asserts that consolidating procurement of common goods and services “will eliminate waste and duplication, while enabling agencies to focus on their core mission of delivering the best services to the American people.” To that end, the EO directs federal agencies to submit proposals to GSA for it to “conduct domestic procurement with respect to common goods and services for the agency….” The order set a 60-day deadline, which will come on May 19, 2025. Thirty days later (i.e., on June 18, 2025), GSA is to “submit a comprehensive plan . . . to procure common goods and services across the dometic components of the Government.”

The EO sets even more aggressive goals for IT acquisition. By April 19, 2025, GSA will be designated as “the executive agency for all Government-wide acquisition contracts [“GWACs”} for information technology contracts.” The EO further directs GSA to “rationalize Government-wide indefinite delivery contract vehicles for information technology for agencies across the Government, including as part of identifying and eliminating contract duplication, redundancy, and other inefficiencies..”

If I’m reading this correctly, the President essentially is directing federal agencies to buy most of their goods and services via GSA contract vehicles such as the Federal Supply Schedule or other GSA GWACS. Could this mean that other GWACs used by many federal agencies for IT purchasing such as NASA’s SEWP contract vehicle or NIH’s CIO-SP program will be shut down? This could be quite unpopular within the Government because some non-GSA contract vehicles are more popular within the Government because GSA’s programs are considered inefficient or too costly to the agency (I won’t bore you with the interagency fees charged to agencies for the use of these contract vehicles).

This also could lead to considerable disruption for contractors. How on earth will all this be implemented at the light speed pace that seems to be the hallmark of this administration? Will existing contracts be terminated or suspended? Will contractors be forced to obtain new GSA contracts they heretofore haven’t sought? How will GSA handle the onslaught of new orders and proposals? To the extent that the past is prologue, this transition will take years, will be ugly, and ultimately won’t save the Government much in the long run.

Consider how the Federal Supply Schedule works. Schedule contractors agree to sell their products and services to the Government subject to not-to-exceed prices. However, in practice, savings are achieved on an order-by-order basis when individual agency contracting officers order items “off the schedule.” This is because they obtain quotations from schedule contract holders that attempt to earn the order by offering a lower price. Some might say that GSA’s main value-add simply is the initial vetting of vendors.

To my mind, this EO really won’t achieve much. Indeed, it could create havoc in the Government and force many purchases to be made on an emergency basis because GSA won’t have the bandwidth to implement these changes quickly enough to manage the transition of routine purchases. An setting aside GSA’s bandwidth, individual agencies still will be responsible for identifying what they need and placing orders. The gutting of the procurement workforce within the ordering agencies could exacerbate what portends to be a painful transition. I understand the high-level idea here - the Government should leverage its collective purchasing power to drive the cost of goods and services needed across the Government. Perhaps this is a good idea, but expecting results overnight is unrealistic, particularly if no-one is left on staff to manage the transition.

In other words, good luck with this.