New Controls on Large Multiple Award Contracts The Office of Federal Procurement Policy is establishing new controls to rein in the proliferation of multiple award contracts and blanket purchase agreements. Beginning in January, OFPP must approve the business case for all new governmentwide acquisition contracts and all multi-agency contracts or BPAs valued at $250 million or more. Starting in fiscal 2013, business cases will be required for any agency-specific contract or agency-specific BPA valued at $100 million or more. Before a final RFP can be issued, business cases must be coordinated with the agency’s OSDBU and approved by the senior procurement executive or an equivalent official. To increase information-sharing, agencies must first post a notice of their plans to create a new vehicle. OFPP Administrator Dan Gordon wrote, “[W]hen an agency is considering starting a large new contract, whether just for itself or as an interagency contract, they’ll post information on a site that other agencies can review, so those other agencies can say, ‘Wait a minute – we have a contract in place already that might meet your needs’ or ‘If you go forward, we’d like to use your new contract, too.’ That should help agencies better determine if their needs can be met using an existing contract or – if they decide a new contract is justified – how they can accommodate other agencies’ needs under the new contract.” Gordon connected the new rules to the Obama administra-tion’s strategic sourcing initiative. “Too often in the past, agency spending for many commonly-used items was fragmented across multiple departments, programs, and components, which means that agencies often spent time writing hundreds of separate contracts, with pricing that varies widely,” he wrote on the Office of Management and Budget’s blog. ”The result is a waste of limited staff time and energy, and prices that are not as good as they should be.” He pointed to the government-wide blanket purchase agreement for office supplies, the adminis-tration’s poster child for effective strategic sourcing. Gordon said agencies are saving up to 20% on their purchases. The government expects the savings will add up to $200 million within a few years. Small businesses won 13 of the 15 places on the BPAs. “Smart use of interagency vehicles and cooperation across agencies have been keys to the growing success we’ve been having with strategic sourcing and leveraging our collective buying power across the government,” Gordon wrote. OFPP faces challenges in getting agencies to let go of their own contract vehicles. In his newsletter, “The Week Ahead,” Larry Allen of Allen Federal Business Partners suggested that OFPP might need “a detachment of law enforcement professionals to bring recalcitrant agencies in-line.”