Procurement Nominee Says He's a Small Business Supporter President Bush’s nominee to head the Office of Federal Procurement Policy says small business runs in his family: Attorney David Safavian’s grandfather owned a small auto parts manufacturing company where he worked as a teenager. At his confirmation hearing before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee April 29, Safavian declared, “There will be no one at OFPP with a greater focus on small business issues than me.” Safavian, 36, is a former congressional staffer, lobbyist and, most recently, chief of staff of the General Services Administration. President Bush nominated him Jan. 22 to succeed Angela Styles, who resigned in September. In his statement to the committee, he listed four priorities: *Management of human capital in the acquisition workforce. He said 40% of government procurement professionals will be eligible to retire in the next five years, so recruiting, retention and training is at the top of his list. “If the acquisition officer isn’t sensitive to small business targets and goals, we are not going to reach those targets and goals,” he said. *Making the Bush administration’s competitive sourcing initiative “even more open, transparent and effective.” “I am surprised by the level of misunderstanding associated with this initiative,” he told the committee. Congress has placed restrictions on competitive sourcing in some agencies and federal employee unions have fought the initiative every step of the way. Safavian said the debate over competitive sourcing has been “a battle of anecdotes.” He said he will create a database so that the costs and benefits can be assessed. *Implementing the president’s small business agenda. “I hope to open federal contracting for more disadvantaged businesses, paying particular attention to opportunities for service-disabled veterans,” he said. *Reviewing regulations and laws on suspension and debarment to “ensure that the government only deals with presently responsible contractors, and that agencies do so in a fair, open and consistent manner.” Senators made it clear that the competitive sourcing issue is likely to consume a lot of his time and attention if he is confirmed. Under questioning, Safavian said he supports “parallel appeal rights” for federal employees and contractors, but he declined to say whether federal employee unions or individual employees should have the right to file protests with the General Accounting Office, as contractors do. GAO ruled that employees and their representatives cannot file protests under existing law. Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Susan Collins (R-ME) has said she will introduce legislation giving the employees protest rights, but she has not specified whether the rights should be granted to unions. Contractor groups say protest rights should be granted only to the “agency tender official,” the official who manages the in-house proposal in a competition, and not to unions, since private-sector unions have no right to protest to GAO if they lose a competition. Union leaders say agency tender officials, as representatives of management, would be unlikely to appeal an agency’s decision in a competition. The committee has set no date for a vote on Safavian’s nomination.