This article is an excerpt from The Art of Tendering: A Global Due Diligence Guide.
In its August 2019 report entitled Job Corps: Actions Needed to Improve Planning for Center Operation Contracts, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the government was failing to properly tender contracts to manage its 119 Job Corps. By way of background, the GAO report noted that in 2016 the Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration (ETA) operated 68 of its 97 Job Corps locations using untendered bridge contracts. Of those 68 bridge contracts, the report found that 49 were extended for at least a year and that a third of those bridge extensions were for two or more years. The GAO found that the high rate of sole-sourcing was caused by staffing shortages since the ETA had insufficient staff to properly administer the required tendering processes. The report found that the staffing shortages were due to retirements and staff departures, which were compounded by the decision to centralize procurement staff across the organization and then decentralize that staff two years later:
ETA cited several reasons that contributed to its need to use bridge contracts during program year 2016, according to the justification and approval documents we reviewed and our interviews with national and regional officials. For example, acquisition workforce challenges were a primary reason ETA cited for its need to use bridge contracts. ETA also frequently cited protests by Job Corps contractors; at times citing protests that dated back to 2011.
Leading up to program year 2016, ETA national officials said they encountered a number of acquisition workforce challenges that affected their ability to competitively award Job Corps center contracts. These challenges included: (1) staff attrition in key contracting positions, (2) the need to hire and train new contracting staff, and (3) the need to divert staff to address new requirements under WIOA and other issues.
As discussed earlier, ETA has one contracting officer position for each of its six regions. ETA officials said they faced significant attrition in the Office of Contracts Management around 2013 when all but one of the six regional contracting officers left or retired, leaving them with limited regional resources to award center contracts. San Francisco was the only Job Corps region that did not lose its contracting officer. Officials said that this may help to explain why the region operated under fewer bridge contracts as compared to the other five regions.
In addition, ETA officials said the agency decided to centralize contracting positions in the national office in 2013 due to concerns about oversight of regional contracting staff. In 2015, ETA decided to re-establish its regional contracting structure, with one contracting officer in each region. To address the large number of staff departures, ETA hired new contracting officers and all of the contracting officers we spoke with told us that they joined ETA’s Office of Contracts Management in 2015 or 2016. When ETA filled its staff vacancies, it hired contracting officers who had prior experience at other agencies. Nonetheless, some contracting officers said it still took time for them to get up to speed due to the uniqueness and complexity of Job Corps center operations contracts.
Program officials said that the additional time needed to explain program requirements to new contracting staff slowed down the contracting process. Also, national officials said that contracting officers were unable to competitively award center contracts because of the time needed to carry out acquisition planning tasks, which as we have previously reported, are important to establishing a strong foundation for the contracting process. Such activities include market research, which is used to collect and analyze information about capabilities within the market available to satisfy agency needs. According to ETA’s Acquisition Handbook, market research should occur at least 16 months prior to the anticipated award of a new center contract and after the requirements have been developed by the Office of Job Corps.
While the GAO found that “by the end of program year 2017, most of the centers operating under bridge contracts during program year 2016 (48 of 68) had transitioned to competitive contracts”, the ETA continued to face workforce challenges. As the report stated, “officials expressed concern about having sufficient staff to award a large group of contracts that will begin to expire in program years 2021 and 2022”. The GAO noted that “ETA officials said it takes about 8 to 12 months from solicitation to contract award for new 5-year competitive procurements” and based on those timeframes, “acquisition planning for a center contract set to expire in January 2021 would usually need to begin early 2020”. However, the GAO found that the “ETA does not have a comprehensive workforce strategy to address its workforce challenges or support these new contract awards”, which exposed the ETA to using more non-competitive bridge contracts again in the future:
Contracting officials expressed concerns about their capacity to conduct acquisition planning to award future center contracts given that two of six regions are currently without contracting officers, despite efforts to fill all vacant contracting officer positions. For the centers that we projected will need new contracts in program years 2021 and 2022, ETA will need to begin conducting acquisition planning relatively soon. According to contracting officials, acquisition planning and market research can take anywhere from 6 months to several years, depending on the requirement. Once these steps are completed, officials said it can take approximately 8 to 12 months from solicitation to award for new 5-year competitive procurements. Therefore, acquisition planning for a Job Corps center contract set to expire in January 2021 would need to begin before early 2020.
The GAO found that this planning problem was exacerbated by the inability to retain procurement staff, since job vacancies continued to be an ongoing problem at the ETA, which created a ripple effect of workload challenges for remaining procurement staff:
2015 and 2016 was essential to reducing the procurement backlog of competitive contracts to operate Job Corps centers. By the end of program year 2016, ETA officials said contracting officers were in all six regions. However, at the time of our review, ETA was again without contracting officers in two of Job Corps’ six regions. According to officials, staff vacancies can create workload challenges. Each region is assigned one contracting officer who is responsible for awarding contracts for center operations, among other support contracts. Most of these contracting officers oversee 15 or more centers operated by contractors.
When one of the six regional contracting officer positions has a vacancy, the contracting workload for that region is redistributed to other regions and the national office, which can have significant implications. For example, at the time of our review, national contracting officials told us that they were assisting the two regions where contracting officers had recently left. They said this increased their workload, as they had to attend to the contracting needs of these two regions while fulfilling their national contracting oversight duties. Similarly, contracting officials we spoke with in five regions noted vacancies in other positions that support the contracting process, such as those for contract specialists who provide support during the contracting process and program officials who provide technical expertise during proposal evaluations. In addition, program officials we spoke with during our site visits told us that some program manager positions have been vacant for at least a year in three regions. As a result, program officials said they have to manage and oversee additional centers to ensure coverage until those positions are filled.
However, the GAO noted that notwithstanding these ongoing staffing issues, the ETA had failed to develop a strategy to address the job vacancies that were impacting its procurement operations:
ETA officials said they have not developed a written acquisition workforce strategy to address staff vacancies for Job Corps. We have previously reported on the benefits of federal agencies planning strategically for their acquisition workforces, particularly for those agencies that rely heavily on contracting personnel with the necessary experience and skills to award and oversee complex contracts to accomplish their missions. In addition, our prior work has highlighted key components of agencies’ strategic workforce plans, including identifying gaps between current and needed workforce capabilities and developing strategies to meet these capabilities. Agency officials stated that DOL assesses and prioritizes needs across the agency when authorizing hiring actions, including for the Job Corps program. National and regional contracting officials told us that they have not been included in decisions regarding efforts to fill vacancies in critical contracting positions or to determine the number of contracting positions and the location of those positions (i.e., among the regions).
As this case study illustrates, the failure to properly staff a procurement department can have a significant adverse impact on an institution’s ability to properly manage its contracting practices. Public institutions should be careful to avoid normalizing staffing shortages since this can create a significant spiral effect of further staff departures that result in recurring cycles of sub-optimal contracting processes.
