VA is the largest health care system in America, and serving the more than 8 million Veterans enrolled in VA health care requires a vast amount of products and services. In our continuing efforts to build a world-class customer-service enterprise closely oriented around the needs of our Veterans, we must provide a standardized system to streamline our purchasing.
As VA’s Acting Chief Acquisition Officer, I am ultimately responsible for acquisition management throughout the department, including program management and contracting. My goal for those of us in the acquisition and procurement is to be trusted business advisors for our customers, working with them to make sound decisions that will benefit our Veterans and taxpayers.
To assist us in this effort I have outlined 10 VA Acquisition guiding principles in the video above for all VA employees with acquisition and procurement responsibilities to use to ensure timely and accurate delivery of products and services. These principles place a greater emphasis on collaboration and rapid sourcing of requirements at affordable prices leading to the delivery of products or services that are in the best interest of our Veterans.
About the author: Greg Giddens serves as VA’s acting chief acquisition officer and principal executive director of VA’s Office of Acquisition, Logistics and Construction (OALC). OALC supports America’s Veterans and families by delivering and enabling business solutions that meet the ongoing and emerging needs of our customers. For more information about OALC, visit, http://www.va.gov/oalc/
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Greg’s “Guiding Principles” don’t sound very supportive of the “Rule of Two” or other Veteran Owned Small Business or Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business acquisition and procurement practices, even though the Supreme Court just held the VA accountable for purposefully and willfully violating this provision of Federal law for years. I am all for Mr. Giddens’ attempts to do things better, faster, cheaper, but there are still reasons why some of the provisions of the FAR are in place. The laws that established those provisions had a purpose to accomplish certain things: to avoid corruption, to enable veterans and small businesses to get a leg up against the behemoth contractors who suck government money like a giant vacuum from our Treasury, to ensure fairness in contracting, and more. I just didn’t get a good feeling from the “Guiding Principles” that these provisions of the FAR were deemed as important as they ought to be in VA acquisition and procurement, and that concerns me greatly, both as a citizen and a disabled veteran small business owner.