Blog
Managing the Business of Government
Challenge
The Federal Government awards over $1.5 trillion in federal contracts and financial assistance each year—and sometimes much more in times of crisis.
This creates an enterprise-level opportunity to lean on federal systems for managing the business of government—the goods and services we buy and the financial assistance and resources we provide and oversee—to create and sustain good quality union jobs, address persistent racial and gender wealth and wage gaps, and address other challenges our nation faces. The Administration has already taken bold action to leverage federal acquisition and financial assistance to take on our most pressing challenges as a country. Accomplishing these ambitious goals and activities collectively will also require continuous improvements in our procurement, financial assistance, and financial management ecosystems. This shift will require new measures and processes, new training for the federal workforce, and new tradeoffs that agencies together will need to address going forward.
Opportunity
We can harness this collective power and make connections across the federal acquisition and financial assistance systems to strengthen the U.S. manufacturing base and support American workers, catalyze new solutions that address the climate crisis and enhance sustainability, and advance equity.
The public will benefit from a government that buys together and manages financial assistance together, devoting attention to how these systems deliver results—prosperity, security, and opportunity—for all people in this country. Federal agencies will look across existing Administration initiatives to ensure that system-wide, continuous improvement in federal acquisition, financial management, and financial assistance systems occurs. This system-wide focus can include, for example: opportunity and issue spotting, including resolution of conflicts across discrete lines of effort; training and guidance for practitioners within agencies; data-management and evidence-building strategies; and other capacity-building strategies.
Leadership
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Learn more about how the Federal Government is working to improve stewardship of federal dollars on our data page.
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Monitor
Track the U.S. Supplier Base Dashboard here.
Read
The new Uniform Grants Guidance reduces the burden on grant recipients and increases transparency for more than $1.2 trillion in annual Federal financial assistance.
Read
Newly issued memo M-24-11 on Reducing Burden in the Administration of Federal Financial Assistance provides direction to Agencies to simplify Notices of Funding Opportunities.
Strategies
Activity
April 2024
During the performance period, strategy leads continued to advance federal priorities related to federal acquisition efficiency and cost savings. This release highlights the collaborative efforts across agencies to optimize contracting processes and outcomes. This includes sharing successful practices as part of the Better Contracting Initiative, including performance-based contract requirements and cost containment measures for high-risk contracts. Successful practices are featured in the Acquisition Accelerate (AcqCelerate) Savings Challenge, which gathers a diverse range of strategies aimed at enhancing efficiency and driving acquisition cost savings across federal agencies.
The Council on Federal Financial Assistance (COFFA) continues to identify opportunities to reduce agency and recipient burden in order to strengthen accountability and deliver results for the American people. On February 15, 2024 the Federal Program Inventory became available to the public. This website is a new comprehensive, searchable tool with critical information about all domestic Federal financial assistance information. This website makes it easier for potential recipients and applicants to find programs, ensure the effective stewardship of taxpayer funds, and further increase government transparency. On April 4, 2024 OMB released the 2024 Revision to the Uniform Guidance. These revisions promote a culture of improved stewardship of federal funds, equitable access to programs and services, a reduction of administrative burden for federal agencies and recipients of Federal financial assistance, and streamlined and effective oversight and implementation of federal programs. Together, federal agencies will be working to ensure the consistent implementation of the 2024 Revisions with the COFFA leading this coordinated effort. The COFFA announced a whole of government approach to simplify Notices of Funding Opportunities (NOFOs). This effort, identified in M-24-11, will prioritize simplifying NOFOs for programs where the eligible applicants may have limited organizational capacity, particularly those in underserved communities. The COFFA will be working in the upcoming months to develop tools to reduce the complexity and improve the accessibility of NOFOs to further increase access to Federal financial assistance.
Highlights
February 2024
Since its launch in October 2023, the Council on Federal Financial Assistance (COFFA) has convened Senior Financial Assistance Officers monthly and has also hosted community meetings to share relevant topics with the entire Federal financial assistance workforce. During this period, COFFA leadership identified priorities for the next twelve months to support the vision of the Council:
- Creating a partnership among federal grant-making agencies;
- Providing a single forum to inform Federal financial assistance policy, oversight, and technology activities;
- Providing strategic direction, policy recommendations, and priority-setting for other government-wide grant-related activities;
- Reducing administrative burdens for both federal agencies and recipients of Federal financial assistance, particularly those that may be under-resourced or underserved; and
- Advancing the Administration’s priorities to improve customer experience with delivery of services, improve equity, and leverage Federal financial assistance as a catalyst to build back better.
FY24 Q1 period marked the exciting launch of the Better Contracting Initiative (BCI), a significant step in supporting Strategy 1 within the Business of Government Priority Area. The BCI is a comprehensive, four-pronged strategy designed to improve federal government purchasing. It aims to:
- Ensure better terms and prices for goods and services, with a focus on buying from small and disadvantaged businesses.
- Generate over $10 billion annually in savings and cost avoidance while improving the performance of federal contracts.
- Leverage data across federal agencies, negotiating common enterprise-wide software licenses, and
- Getting contract requirements right the first time–all to support a strategic approach in federal acquisition.
A significant step toward negotiating common enterprise-wide software licenses has been the establishment of a government-wide acquisition strategy Interagency Project Team (IPT), tasked with reviewing agency contract files and analyzing pricing data to identify common terms and a strategic pricing approach for discussions with major software vendors in the coming months. Stay tuned to performance.gov for future updates. For more information about BCI, visit OMB’s website here.
Highlights
December 2023
Under Strategy 1, the team on Priority Area 3 is focused on the Federal Government’s national strategy to build public health supply chain resiliency. Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) Made in America Office (MIAO) and Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP) are collaborating with experts in requirements, acquisition, and supply chain at the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) in the development of a plan to strengthen the long-term health of the domestic Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) industry in furtherance of the Make PPE in America Act. For Strategy 2, the Council on Federal Financial Assistance (COFFA), established by OMB Memorandum M-23-19, convened for its first meeting in October 2023. Together with the Chair OMB and Co-Chair HHS, council members are developing priorities for the COFFA to accomplish within the first year. One of the projects that already commenced is the identification of the core competencies necessary for the financial assistance workforce. This effort will help to identify the knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary for this workforce that are the same at each Federal financial assistance agency. New milestones are presented in this update to communicate progress toward the completion of this project.
Highlights
August 2023
Through this period, strategy leads continued to advance federal priorities through federal acquisition and Federal financial assistance. This release includes updates on accomplishments related to existing milestones and several new planned milestones.
Highlights
May 2023
Strategy leads continued to implement action plans to advance Federal priorities for sustainability and equity through Federal acquisition and Federal financial assistance. In Federal acquisition, this release includes important updates related to priority supply chains and investing in the acquisition workforce. Federal financial assistance leads announce the release of a new training for the financial assistance workforce.
Highlights
March 2023
Cross-agency teams continued to develop and refine their action plans to advance sustainability and equity priorities for the Nation through the Federal acquisition and financial assistance systems. Each strategy has defined initial success metrics and milestones.
Highlights
November 2022
Cross-agency teams have been working to develop and refine action plans to achieve the President’s vision to leverage Federal acquisition and financial assistance systems to advance priorities for the Nation. Each strategy is defining strategy-wide success metrics to measure progress toward achieving their ambitious goals.
Highlights
Diverse & Resilient Federal Marketplace
Enhancing diversity in federal contracting to build a more resilient marketplace
Focused on enhancing the federal supplier base, this goal introduces a common definition of “new entrant” and two new analytics tools – the Federal Supplier Base Dashboard and the Procurement Equity Tool (government use only) – to guide agencies as they take steps to find small disadvantaged businesses and other contractors and measure progress in diversifying the federal supplier base. See the Memorandum implementing a common definition for “new entrant.”
Projects and Milestones
Completed
- Issued guidance directing agencies to use a common definition for “new entrant” as they take steps to find small disadvantaged businesses and other contractors and measure progress in diversifying the federal supplier base.
- Began using benchmarking to evaluate opportunities for strengthening supplier diversity.
Agency Spotlight
Recognizing the importance of clear contract requirements and their role in fostering diversity and resilience in the federal marketplace, agencies are strategically leveraging specialized workshops to improve procurement processes and outcomes. The Civilian Services Acquisition Workshop (CSAW) Program facilitates GSA’s effective support for all government agencies in the development of better performance-based requirements and acquisition strategies while also building positive, long-term business relationships with those customers. The CSAW Program operates with the vision of making excellence in performance-based acquisition attainable, understandable, and applied across government. Check out the CSAW website for more information.
Better Use of Acquisition Data
Expand interoperability of acquisition data for improved decision-making
The Procurement Co-Pilot application (government use only) was pre-released in January 2024 and is designed to improve the efficiency and quality of market research by providing access to government-wide data to enable agencies to make better, more cost-effective acquisition decisions. The Procurement-Co-Pilot aggregates over 80 million rows of data, facilitating three key steps in the acquisition lifecycle: product pricing research, vendor search, and contract vehicle identification. Tailored for contract specialists, officers, and agency buyers, this application enhances market research efficiency by providing unprecedented access to pricing information.
Projects and Milestones
Completed
- Completed Market Research and Pricing Data pilot to provide more detailed operational pricing and contract information to federal contracting personnel.
- Executed data sharing agreements to support data transfers among participating agencies.
Agency Spotlight
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is making better use of procurement data by training 100 staff members from various departments in data-driven spend optimization techniques. With this specialized knowledge, staff can effectively leverage procurement data to make more informed decisions. Furthermore, these staff members can now return to their respective organizations and share their expertise, empowering their colleagues to also utilize procurement data for improved decision-making.
Efficient Federal Financial Assistance
Strengthen and formalize the governance of Federal financial assistance
The Council on Federal Financial Assistance (COFFA) is working to ensure that federal agencies have the tools they need to deliver Federal financial assistance programs in an efficient, effective, and equitable manner, while also reducing administrative burdens on Federal financial assistance applicants and recipients.
Projects and Milestones
Completed
- Established the Year 1 COFFA Priorities.
In progress
- Publish a website to communicate COFFA Priorities and Resources.
Agency Spotlight
The Department of Health and Human Services is the first agency co-lead of the Council on Federal Financial Assistance.
