While we at TAPE provide services, other companies provide products, or a combination of the two. In terms of federal contracting, commercial items are all the things that are stuff, for example office supplies like pencils and paper clips.
What Sec. 846 of NDAA 2018 is trying to do is establish Amazon-like online portals where contracting officers and authorized people can simply go online and order their products and commercial items.
That would replace the current process, which in many cases is ordering these supplies off GSA schedules, and will make it easier and more efficient for government buyers to do their job. The problem is whether this takes away opportunities for competition. How do you regulate all of these things?
There is still work to be done to determine who is included in the portal, how search results are delivered, what kind of e-commerce portal do you create, and how this relates to the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) and the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS).
Until we figure out these things, I don’t think this portal will happen immediately. There doesn’t seem to be a rush to implement this, and this might be partially because GSA sees this as a competitor to their own portal. But I also don’t think we’ll be waiting too long.
