Katy Kale, acting administrator of the General Services Administration and 2021 Wash100 Award recipient, and Sonny Hashmi, commissioner of GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service and fellow 2021 Wash100 Award winner, talked about the current administration’s four priorities and the future of ongoing programs.
Hashmi and Kale said GSA will play a key role in the administration’s priorities of managing the COVID-19 pandemic, advancing economic recovery, addressing the climate crisis and promoting diversity, equity and inclusion.
“And, as it turns out, FAS has an incredibly integral role to play in all four of them,” Hashmi said. “One of our key focus areas right now is to make sure that we’re maximizing the buying power of the federal government to bring to bear and moving the needle on all those priorities.”
The two GSA leaders also shared their insights on the future of Technology Transformation Services, the transition from DUNS numbers to unique identity identifier, migration of procurement tools to the beta SAM website, the impact of the SolarWinds breach on the agency’s programs and federal acquisitions and status of e-commerce pilots.
They also discussed the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) and how it correlates with the Department of Defense’s Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) program.
“We are, for example, integrating CMMC requirements into all of our schedule and [governmentwide acquisition contract, or GWAC,] programs so that when agencies buy through GSA, they already have built in confidence that those technologies are going to be, the providers are actually going to be compliant and can meet that compliance. Similar kinds of efforts are going to be underway for FedRAMP, as well,” Hashmi said.
“There’s a lot of [changes] coming for FedRAMP; some are focused on making it more efficient and streamlined, others are focused on making sure it’s more well integrated into overall supply chain efforts,” he added.
Hashimi will deliver a keynote speech at GovCon Wire’s Modernizing Federal Acquisition Forum on April 15. To register for the virtual forum and view other upcoming events, visit the GovConWire Events page.
