GSA’s Renewed Commitment to Category Management—Reaffirming the Executive Order and Likely Redoing the Federal Acquisition Regulations and Agency Specifications—Implications for Small Businesses
GSA reaffirmed its commitment to Contract Management/Consolidation of Contracts, which has long been considered harmful to small businesses overall. There have been rumors and an apparent taken down GSA page regarding overhauling the Federal Acquisition Regulations.
GSA is working with the FAR Council and other stakeholders to change the regulations. As the FAR currently stands at approximately 2,000 pages with agency specific regulations (like SBAs) ballooning that up to over 5,000 pages. The FAR Council consists of the representatives of agencies, which also have internal Category Management teams making recommendations—and are a part of the Category Management Leadership Council.
Acting Administrator for the GSA, Stephen Ehikian, announced last week in the GSA blog that that it intends to implement the Executive Order of March 20, 2025, “Eliminating Waste and Saving Taxpayer Dollars by Consolidating Procurement” a/k/the Procurement Consolidation or Category Management. This EO is exceptionally important to small businesses as Category Management has often been called the bane of small businesses because of its negative impact on the ability, agility, and agency need for specific procurements. Category Management focuses, instead, on Government Wide Award Contract (GWACs) or Best in Class (BIC) type of large contract vehicles that require agencies to get on board the very large contract vehicles—often trading the lower costs and greater agility of small business awards to fit into one of 10 general spend buckets on the large procurement vehicles.
The EO stated “It is time to return the General Services Administration to its original purpose, rather than continuing to have multiple agencies and agency subcomponents separately carry out these same functions in an uncoordinated and less economical fashion.
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Consolidating domestic Federal procurement in the General Services Administration — the agency designed to conduct procurement — will eliminate waste and duplication, while enabling agencies to focus on their core mission of delivering the best possible services for the American people.”
The EO sets forth timelines by which agencies should comply:
(a) Within 60 days of the date of this order, agency heads shall …. have the General Services Administration conduct domestic procurement with respect to common goods and services for the agency….
(b) Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Administrator shall submit a comprehensive plan to the Director of OMB for the General Services Administration to procure common goods and services across the domestic components of the Government….” https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/eliminating-waste-and-saving-taxpayer-dollars-by-consolidating-procurement/
The Acting Administrator for GSA blog reads as follows:
“GSA will focus on serving our customers, congressional partners and our communities to:
Optimize our Federal Buildings Portfolio.
Streamline and centralize procurement in support of the new Executive Order.
Rationalize our IT infrastructure & Software as a Shared Service.
Embrace GSA’s model (of efficiency) for ourselves.
Streamline and centralize procurement
Maximize the negotiating power of volume buying: In support of the Administration’s Executive Order, 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.
Streamline the procurement process and reduce the compliance burden to increase competition: Our goal is to restore merit-based opportunity and ensure contracts are awarded to those best positioned to fulfill government needs effectively and efficiently – we are working with our Federal Acquisition Regulation council partners and all stakeholders. We 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.
Better technology tools for the contracting workforce: Improving the procurement technology infrastructure in order to create faster vendor onboarding, reduce paper based workflows, improve vendor management and improve data-driven decisions.
Rationalize IT infrastructure and software as a shared service
Consolidating the number of systems for each job: We will reimagine business processes and drive automation to deliver a superior experience for our employees and the American taxpayer. At the same time, we’ll standardize one solution for each job in order to eliminate redundancy and wasteful spending.
Innovation: We’ll continue to pilot Generative AI to increase our team’s productivity with such initial use cases as an AI bot to search across all acquisition policies (saving time for our Contracting Officers) and internal directives/circulars (saving time for our policy team), as well as and code generation (driving productivity for our engineers).
Centralizing our data to be accessible across teams: To increase collaboration and prepare for the future opportunities with AI, we need to break down the data silos and allow systems to better communicate with one another.
Increase Government’s access to best-in-class technologies: We are reimagining the FedRAMP authorization process to accelerate the adoption of secure, cloud technologies in order to modernize the government’s aging IT infrastructure.
Optimize GSA’s cloud and software spending: We will save money and reduce redundancies conducting a line-by-line evaluation of every technology solution, ensuring we only pay for the licenses that we use and eliminate redundant systems.” https://www.gsa.gov/blog/2025/03/25/my-vision-for-gsa
Category Management does have a place in procurement but not at the cost of reducing the ability of the industrial base and its efficiency through small businesses to deliver quality and cost effective goods and services. Stay tuned for more updates as this progresses. Practioner note—if an agency can prove that the agency gets greater value remaining off the category management contracts—a pretty good feat—than it may be able to retain the contract. For instance, contracts that must be procured quickly and check off the agency boxes for specific needs and/or national security may be able to not be moved away from small businesses and onto large contract vehicles.