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Government Leader home > March 2005 issue
March 2005; Vol. 1 No. 1
ACQUISITION: Maintain Boundaries
By Richard W. Walker
In-house firewall is key to A-76 outsourcing reviews.
One tricky piece for agencies running sourcing competitions
under OMB Circular A-76 is maintaining a partition, or firewall, between
their management team and their in-house most-efficient
organization, the group of civil servants bidding for the work.
You have to make sure the MEO does
not get an unfair edge over outside bidders
in the competition.
Managers at NASA's Langley Research
Center in Hampton, Va., dealt with the
issue last year when they conducted their
first A-76 competition.
A-76 requires an agency to appoint an
agency tender official from its management
ranks to name the MEO team and
lead its proposal.
During the competition, that official
has to maintain independence from the
management side, including from the
contracting officer and the performance
work statement team.
Drew Hope, a manager with the
Langley center's Mechanical and Instrumentation
Engineering Group, was
the agency tender official on Langley's
bid. He knew that his MEO wouldn't
have any special access.
"We had to develop processes for getting
information because of the firewall
that had to be in place between the MEO
team and the performance work statement
team to ensure that we received no
unfair advantages during the competition,"
he said.
One of the challenges for management
was treating the MEO team as simply
another bidder, said Rosemary Froehlich,
NASA's contracting officer on the
competition.
"We were very careful with our firewall,"
she said. "Drew was on that side of
the firewall regardless of his previous
position. If Drew requested information,
we treated it almost as a Freedom of Information
Act request."
The NASA employee team last January
won the competition over an industry
bidder to provide highly specialized hardware
testing and machining services to
the facility.
The 37-member group of civil servants
bid $9.3 million over five years
for the work, representing a savings of
about $4 million over the life of the
agreement, which is being phased in
over 120 days.
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