GAO has cited broad challenges facing the federal acquisition community following a forum on improving federal acquisition in an environment of increasing reliance on contractors and severe fiscal constraint.
While the overall acquisition workforce has remained at around 106,000 throughout the past five years, the federal government spent $388 billion on contracting in fiscal 2005, up from $219 billion in fiscal 2000, and GAO called for a reexamination and evaluation of strategic and tactical approaches to acquisition.
One challenge is to determine the appropriate role of contractors in a changing environment without a clear picture of what functions may be contracted out, and the formal and informal means by which decisions to do so are made, according to GAO-07-45SP.
Ensuring that the federal workforce has both the capacity and capability to manage contractor operations is often difficult because policy makers are unclear on what constitutes the acquisition workforce, and agency leaders have not elevated the importance of the acquisition workforce within their organizations, participants said.
Further, in an increasingly contractor-dependent environment, many participants cited the challenge of managing for results in the face of frequent mismatches among wants, needs, affordability, and sustainability, as well as unrealistic and often changing requirements.
