#procurement-reform

#procurement-reform

The role was flagged up last week by the Office of Management and Budget, which highlighted a $198,200-$228,000 salary for the Washington DC-based role. The successful candidate will manage "the Federal Information Technology (IT) portfolio by establishing policies and standards for the use of IT, overseeing agency budgeting and management of IT, and assessing agency information security and cybersecurity policies and practices." The listing is blunt about other aspects of the role.

We think that they've done some really, really great things in there. But again, this is a really rare opportunity to attack some of those requirements that are most burdensome, that's what we try to identify in this letter - where can we go further in streamlining those requirements that really are the ones that add to the timelines, and that are the ones that disincentivize certain elements of industry from participating.

"We cannot f---ing wait to innovate until Americans are dying on the battlefield," Driscoll said in his remarks at the annual meeting of the Association of the United States Army in Washington. "We must act now to enable our soldiers. Our window to change is right now, and we have a plan to do it. We will set the pace with innovation, and we will win with silicon and software, and not with our soldiers' blood and bodies," he added.

The basic idea of share-in-savings is quite simple and straightforward: a contractor is paid, in part or in some instances completely, not through appropriated funds but in the form of a percentage of the cost savings their efforts generate. At the time, I praised this effort as the ultimate form of performance-based contracting and as a polar opposite to a contractor being paid for just showing up.

An executive order unveiled by the White House in late July aims to "unleash" the U.S. drone industry. The initiative includes billions in federal investments to accelerate the deployment of unmanned systems across defense, homeland security, and critical infrastructure. As the order makes clear, drones and other unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are no longer a nascent sector; they are now platforms of power.