The Trump administration has issued an executive order entitled Eliminating Waste and Saving Taxpayer Dollars by Consolidating Procurement. This order, or Consolidation EO, has some guidelines for how procurement will be reorganized under the Trump administration, so it’s useful to go through some of the key language. One item in particular is a keen focus on category management by using GSA for various types of procurement. While it’s been a driving force of procurement reform over the years, this order puts category management into even sharper focus.
The Consolidation EO was issued on March 20, 2025. Here are some of the key components.
Common Goods and Services
These add up to $490 billion per year in federal contracts and are defined somewhat loosely as “the types of goods and services purchased by nearly every executive department and agency (agencies)” and “the common Government-wide categories defined by the Category Management Leadership Council led by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).”
For policy reasons, the EO continues, consolidating domestic procurement within GSA “will eliminate waste and duplication, while enabling agencies to focus on their core mission of delivering the best possible services for the American people.”
Timing
- Within 60 days each agency must submit proposals to GSA, “to have the General Services Administration conduct domestic procurement with respect to common goods and services for the agency, where permitted by law.” That would put the deadline as May 19, 2025.
- Within 90 days, or June 18, 2025, GSA must “of the date of this order, the Administrator shall “submit a comprehensive plan . . . to procure common goods and services across the domestic components of the Government, where permitted by law.
- Within 30 days, or Saturday, April 19, 2025, GSA will be designated as the “the executive agent for all Government-wide acquisition contracts for information technology” and GSA shall “rationalize Government-wide indefinite delivery contract vehicles for information technology for agencies across the Government, including as part of identifying and eliminating contract duplication, redundancy, and other inefficiencies.”
- And GSA has 14 days to issue a memorandum concerning the Government-wide IT discussed in the prior bullet point.
The GSA now has a website devoted to consolidation. As of this writing, there are not a ton of details on there, but it mentions that it was created in concert with the Consolidation EO to be a source of updates on the consolidation efforts across multiple agencies into the GSA.
In a statement, the acting GSA administrator noted: “we’ll continue to centralize government procurement for common goods and services in order to negotiate the best prices for the taxpayer. We have already kicked off this effort with four agencies. We will ensure a strong partnership with each agency in order to meet each agency’s specialized procurement needs.” This has already started with four initial agencies. In addition, he noted that “[w]e want to accelerate the adoption of best-in-class technologies by updating our compliance standards so that best-in-class enterprises and smaller businesses can compete for government business.”
This last statement does reference “smaller businesses.” It’s not clear how smaller businesses will be a focus, but they are part of the emphasis.
This is consistent with the idea of category management. The term category management, according to an executive branch memo from 2019, “refers to the business practice of buying common goods and services as an enterprise to eliminate redundancies, increase efficiency, and deliver more value and savings from the Government’s acquisition programs.” The Consolidation EO is elevating this approach and making GSA the central agency in carrying out its goals.
What this means is that many government contracting contracts for common goods and services will be moving to GSA, away from the current multiple award contracts that are managed by other agencies such as NIH. What’s less clear is how fast this will happen. The Consolidation EO has some short deadlines, but it’s less clear if the agencies must transfer those multiple award contracts now, or simply wait until the next iteration of contracts. It’s also not clear how much negotiation there will be between GSA and the other agencies over what will be transferred to GSA. Finally, what will the impact be on small businesses, given that GSA guidance does want to maintain small business involvement as a key issue. We’ll keep you posted on SmallGovCon as we hear more.
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