Interagency Contracts Flower, Spread Like Weeds A working group of the federal Acquisition Advisory Panel has concluded that there are too many interagency contract vehicles and rules are needed to control their growth. The panel’s working group on interagency contracting is developing recommendations for rules to govern the creation and continuation of the vehicles. In its draft report, the group said, “There are no uniform standards for their creation and no governmentwide measures to support their continuation based on desired performance.” The Advisory Panel was created by Congress in the Services Acquisition Reform Act of 2003 with a mandate to review all procurement laws and regulations. Its recommendations are due in February. The working group is looking at GSA schedules, governmentwide acquisition contracts, interagency contracts and enterprise-wide contract vehicles that are created by individual agencies. It said nobody seems to know how many of them exist. The Defense Information Systems Agency alone manages 13 multiple award indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contracts that can be used by other agencies. “These vehicles are not a free lunch,” said the group’s chairman, Jonathan Edgerton, vice president of the Aerospace Industries Association. He pointed to the fees paid by agencies to use the vehicles and the bid and proposal costs to industry when contractors have to bid on many different vehicles. The working group said, “Interagency contract vehicles have played an important role in streamlining the Federal government’s acquisition process.” But it said their popularity has led to proliferation. The most recent development is the establishment of enterprise-wide contracts within agencies, such as the Navy’s Seaport-E and Homeland Security’s EAGLE and First Source. Sales on the most popular interagency contracts, the GSA schedules, have quadrupled since 1997, to more than $31 billion in fiscal 2004. The Government Accountability Office and inspectors general at GSA and the Defense Department have uncovered many instances of misuse of interagency contracts. This year GAO added interagency contracting to its list of programs that are at “high risk” for waste, fraud and abuse. OMB’s Office of Federal Procurement Policy plans to create its own working group on interagency contracting to coordinate with the Advisory Panel, acting administrator Robert Burton has said. The Panel is also developing recommendations for governmentwide rules on competition for task and delivery orders. Congress required the Defense Department to attempt to get at least three bids on every order, but there is no similar rule for civilian agencies.