The near-term outlook for some areas of Federal government IT contracting remains cloudy in the very early days of the new Trump administration – and particularly following action by the General Services Administration (GSA) to suspend execution of any new GSA-funded obligations, said David Berteau, president and CEO of the Professional Services Council (PSC), during a call with reporters on Jan. 29.
GSA said in a Jan. 24 memo that it was suspending action on new obligations – including new awards, task and delivery orders, modifications, and options – until further notice.
The memo to the GSA acquisition workforce, the GSA leasing workforce, and the heads of service and staff offices from Acting Administrator Stephen Ehikian said that the “short-term pause will permit the new leadership to understand key acquisition actions, commitments, and approaches and help direct any needed course corrections.”
The acquisition freeze does not apply to nine categories including actions to support the president, vice president, and the Secret Service in ensuring security, as well as actions in support of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
In addition to the GSA action, the Trump administration has taken numerous actions since Jan. 20 to curtail work at Federal agencies with a particular focus on foreign aid activities and ending previous U.S. government efforts to conduct diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policy activities.
Berteau, whose organization advocates for more than 400 organizations that provide services to the Federal government, said his view of the IT services landscape in the early days of the new administration showed what he called a “mixed bag.”
Asked about any discernable impact from early administration actions on Federal IT and cybersecurity work being undertaken by contractors, Berteau replied, “there’s some things on which we don’t any visibility yet.”
“One of the places where this guidance has perhaps been the most confusing is what comes out of GSA,” he said. “GSA guidance oftentimes is associated with both their own direct contracts and the schedules that GSA runs on behalf of many Federal agencies, and a lot of the IT work is done through those GSA schedules and other schedules under other agencies.”
“I don’t think there’s been, from my perspective, clear guidance that expands across the board on that regard,” Berteau continued. “I have not seen as many broad multi-agency stop work orders or reviews underway on it, I think those are still being done largely at the agency level, and we’re assuming that each agency is reviewing its own contracts, regardless of the vehicle under which that contract is being administered.”
“We have, however, seen, I think, dramatic slowdown in new awards, whether they’re covered by an executive order or not,” the PSC president said.
“Some of that is probably driven by uncertainty as to what the administration is going to want to do,” he explained. “Some of it is probably driven by the need to compare … with those priorities. Some of it is probably driven by the uncertainty because we’re still operating under a continuing resolution” on Federal appropriations, which he noted will run out in less than two months.
At the same time, Berteau pointed out that handovers between administrations over the past several decades have led to similar short-term uncertainties.
“This is my eighth since I came to Washington professionally and it is very much like many of the others in some ways, and a little bit different in other ways,” he said.
“It’s common for an incoming administration to review all the programs that are underway and make sure that those programs, should they continue, will be in alignment with the administration’s priorities – this is not an unusual thing for an administration to do,” Berteau said.
“It’s common for an administration to put a hiring freeze in place for Federal civilians, not necessarily always across the board, but it’s happened in every administration, or nearly every administration, since Jimmy Carter came to town in 1977,” he said.
Referring to agency actions over the past ten days to review their ongoing work and how it fits in with the new administration’s goals, Berteau said, “We’ve seen a lot of issuances … and we’ve seen a lot of changes to those after they were put out.”
“I think they have three features that we see as very common – one is a pretty dramatic pause in not only to take a review, but actually to not be doing much while that review is underway,” he said. “More frequently, in the past, such reviews have taken place in concert with ongoing actions, rather than stopping everything and then looking at looking at them over a period of time.”
“There are a bunch of questions that have been raised from, for example, in many agencies, there’s a review underway, but there’s no indication as to who’s doing the review,” he said. “There may be a deadline, but there’s no intervening timetable of what the steps are along the way. It’s not even clear what the criteria are against which the review is being undertaken.”
“These are the kinds of questions that we’ve raised with the agencies … so we’ve seen a lot in the past ten days.” he said.
