Federal technology leaders said Tuesday that the Trump administration’s acquisition reforms are accelerating technology modernization by pushing agencies toward centralized purchasing, streamlined procurement, and greater use of artificial intelligence (AI) to reduce acquisition timelines and improve mission outcomes.
Speaking at MeriTalk’s Shift Happens event in Washington, D.C., officials from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), and industry highlighted this shift in federal procurement.
They said initiatives such as the General Services Administration’s OneGov strategy, revisions to the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), and AI-enabled acquisition tools are shifting procurement away from compliance-focused processes and toward enterprise-wide modernization.
Ajay Phogat, senior advisor to the chief information officer (CIO) at CBP, said the GSA’s OneGov model represents a broader shift toward centralized acquisition across government.
Phogat said the OneGov model, coupled with what he described as a “radical overhaul” of the FAR, is intended to change how agencies procure technology fundamentally.
“The FAR has been the acquisition bible for a very long time,” Phogat said. He said the rewritten regulation, combined with agency-developed acquisition playbooks, will “change the entire acquisition lifecycle” and enable agencies to answer a long-standing question: “You can do agile development. Can you do agile procurement? Now we can say yes.”
Phogat said those changes are already producing measurable results. During the past year, CBP processed $2.65 billion in blanket purchase agreements through enhanced acquisition systems while cutting procurement timelines by 30% from the initial request for information through the contract award.
Nina D’Amato, chief technology strategist for the public sector at Lenovo, said centralized enterprise contracts for widely used productivity tools would free CIOs from one of their most burdensome responsibilities.
“I think it’s actually a dream to have somebody undertake the development of contracts for the enterprise productivity tools like Microsoft 365,” D’Amato said. “When I was a CIO, that was my least favorite part of the job.”
D’Amato also said agencies are building vendor management teams staffed by former technologists who understand organizational data, mission requirements, and operational environments. Those teams, she said, can better evaluate vendors and align procurement decisions with agency missions.
The NRC recently reorganized its Office of the Chief Information Officer to establish its own vendor management team, according to Scott Flanders, NRC chief information officer.
Flanders said NRC is piloting AI tools to support market research and acquisition document development, reducing workload while improving efficiency.
Flanders said acquisition modernization is part of a broader effort to treat enterprise IT as a business function rather than a standalone technology operation.
He said the NRC is aligning IT investments with strategic agency outcomes, expanding automation and AI-assisted development platforms, and identifying opportunities to buy and configure commercial products instead of building custom systems.
“We’re really trying to continue to build out our development platforms, allow for more automation in those platforms,” Flanders said. He added that agencies should increasingly identify opportunities to buy and configure commercial tools rather than develop custom ones.