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By: FEDweek StaffThe SSA has “experienced long-standing human capital and IT modernization planning challenges” that preceded the agency’s recent “efforts to reduce the size of its workforce and contractor and IT spending,” the GAO has said.
The GAO said that at an agency that has obligated at least $1.4 billion annually on IT acquisition in recent years, there is only “limited data on contracting officer workloads to inform staffing assessments” and on contracting officer’s representatives who support hardware and service contracts.
“SSA is in the process of identifying changes to its IT acquisition workforce” reflecting Trump administration initiatives for reducing the total agency workforce from 57,000 to 50,000, reducing costs across all spending categories, and consolidating more procurement functions in the GSA, a report said.
“To operate effectively in this changing environment, SSA needs quality workload information that accounts for complexity to ensure it can accurately assess and document its IT acquisition staffing needs to accomplish its future goals,” it said.
The GAO also pointed to an internal SSA assessment finding that senior-level contracting officers had deficiencies in acquisitions-related competencies. However, the pertinent training plan has not been updated since 2019, and “given the time since the last training plan update and ongoing organizational changes, it is not clear if SSA will prioritize implementing training to address these gaps,” it said.
It said that management agreed with recommendations including that SSA should assess and document contracting officer and contracting officer’s representative staffing needs based on quality workload information; and that it should carry out a training plan to address acquisitions-related competency gaps for IT contracting officers.
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