Six Practical Steps to Improve Contracting

The IBM Center and George Mason University co-sponsored a series of breakfast seminars over the course of 2008 with a series of acquisition experts who constituted the Acquisition Reform Working Group. They believed that whoever won the election, contracting issues would be on the front burner. With the passage of the Stimulus Bill, having an effective federal contracting function will be critical to the success of the Bill. While many observers see the current federal contracting system as broken, the seminar participants identified a series of practical steps that can be taken now to begin to fix it.