Interview transcript:

 

Terry Gerton I thought we would just take advantage of the end of December, the end 2025 and ask you to take a look. There’s certainly been no shortage of acquisition news and reforms, but as you think about the whole of the last 12 months, what really sticks out for you is the most significant changes that the Trump administration has made in acquisition?

Emily Murphy So I think there’s three things, or three groups of things I’ll say, that I think are very significant. The first one is just how involved the administration’s been in acquisition. They came in and the leadership on day one got very involved in government contracting. To this day we’re seeing reviews at the secretary level, administrator level, of procurement. But from day one you saw the leadership coming in at GSA and at other agencies making procurement and acquisition really a focus. They did those “defend the spend” reviews. So it’s been a much more intense focus on government contracting than we’ve seen in a long time. And then that was followed up with the three executive orders that I think of as going together that came out. Where the president looked at first — wanting the government to buy commercial when possible, saying that we are going to consolidate how procurement operated, we’re going to buy as one government, and that we were really empowering GSA on that level. And then announcing that we were going to rewrite the FAR. Then the third one has to be the actual FAR rewrite, which was an amazing amount of work that the OFPP, GSA, NASA, Department of War did in a matter of months. And we’ve got several agencies having adopted that deviation. So I think those would be the three things I’d point to as the biggest. There was so much that happened in 2025.

Terry Gerton When you think about those three together, what would you say the biggest impact has been, especially on the contracting community?

Emily Murphy The contracting community is still trying to figure out what the new normal is. Reviews, repricing OneGov initiative, the change in the workforce with the deferred resignation program and that fork in the road, there just aren’t as many people engaged in contracting anymore. And so everyone’s trying to figure out still how to execute. How do we get stuff done? And that’s probably the biggest thing I’ve seen affecting both industry and government alike on the government contracting side.

Terry Gerton Well, you mentioned the fewer number of contracting officials in the government. There’s been so many disruptions, the DRP, the shutdown, the continuing resolution. What is life like for the contracting workforce these days?

Emily Murphy Hectic. Again, contracting officers are very mission-oriented and rule-oriented people. So, they’ve got a conflict right now in that the rules are changing, which makes it hard for them to be as strict in adherence. And they’re trying to deliver on a mission that’s also really rapidly evolving with a lot less resources, but a lot of new tools also, like AI-empowered tools — GSA AI comes to mind. A very new approach to acquisition, in that they’re being told, “go out and look for commercial.” We’re going to get rid of a lot of the clauses that they’ve been trained to use from day one. Speed is important, but at the same time, knowing that there is a lot of oversight waiting for them. And when I say oversight, I don’t just mean the traditional oversight community, but you’ve also got a situation where the heads of agencies are reviewing individual procurements themselves, which is a very unusual situation to find ourselves in. So their bosses are looking very closely at the work they’re doing.

Terry Gerton Are you seeing any evidence of training or common guidance that’s going to help them pull all of those diverse stimuli together?

Emily Murphy I’ve got the say, the work when they did the FAR rewrite, the practitioner album, the companion guide, there are great resources there. It’s on-demand training, so you can go and look at it again and again and it’s short, to the point, you can get there. But there’s not the time for the traditional training that we’re used to, where someone would be going to DAU or FAI and taking a class. Very much it’s people need to be trained right instantly and be able to go in and put those in place, and a rewrite of the entire FAR is a pretty extensive thing to be training someone on. So, got to give credit to the folks who put that together. They put together as many resources as they could. But it’s going to take some time for that all to sink in and for us to see how it works. And remembering that most of it’s still being done via deviation and very few agencies have the same deviations right now. So the uniformity that we’ve come to expect with government contracting isn’t there right now. It’ll come back, but it’s not there right now.

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Emily Murphy. She’s a senior fellow at the George Mason University Baroni Center for Government Contracting and former administrator of General Services Administration. All right, Emily, let’s turn to our crystal ball to looking ahead to 2026. With all of those changes that you just really quickly summarized for us, what trends do you expect to dominate acquisition in 2026?

Emily Murphy I think we’re going to have another year of reviews. I think that we’re going to continue to have scrutiny. I think there’s going to be a push to get the FAR rulemaking process done. I think that there’s going to be an increased push towards using CSOs, OTAs. Hopefully we’ll get SBIR reauthorized soon, because I think the nontraditional contracting is going to continue to be a key area of focus. And I think when you look at the PMA, we’re getting a very clear signal that there’s going to be more consolidation happening as well.

Terry Gerton Well, speaking of the PMA, there’s some things in it that you might expect to see, but some things that you might expect to see that aren’t in it. For example, customer experience and shared services that have been tent poles for several administrations.

Emily Murphy That’s true. I was surprised that shared services in particular isn’t called out explicitly. I think you can read it into a fair number of places, but it’s not called out as its own goal or as its own objective. When you think of the buying as one entity, smarter faster and cheaper, that seems to be pushing towards the idea of procurement as a shared service. The customer experience isn’t itself called out directly, but we do talk about leveraging technology to deliver faster and more secure services. We’re looking at trying to optimize the real estate portfolio so that people can have cost-effective locations for agency buildings. I don’t think that the customer’s written out, but they’re not called out explicitly in the same way they have been in the past.

Terry Gerton The language on “demand partners who deliver” seems to be sending a message to contractors and grantees.

Emily Murphy It is. They’re saying they want to contract with the best businesses. And that’s not surprising given that there’s been a lot of conversation about trying to redo past performance. And we’ve heard it both from Congress and from the administration that we need to be putting more focus on making sure we really are getting results out of our contracts. Holding contractors and grant recipients accountable is very much in keeping with the rhetoric we’ve heard over the last year, and those “defend the spend” conversations that have taken place between GSA and contractors and other agencies and their contractors since they’ve done those reviews. The OneGov deals very much are about demanding better pricing, demanding results. I was surprised to see that they were saying put political appointees in control of the grant process. GSA is not a grant agency; it wasn’t an area we spent a lot of time on. But I always thought that political appointees did best when we set the objectives, and then we let the career employees go in and implement them and hold them accountable for meeting those objectives, rather than actually running the process itself. But it will be interesting to see how that is implemented and what results are being prioritized.

Terry Gerton Exactly. And there’s one other piece here. The deliver results, but particularly by American. Do you feel like that’s getting more emphasis than it has in the past in this PMA?

Emily Murphy Absolutely. I think it’s, rebuild American industry through prioritizing and enhancing made-in-America execution. I’ll be curious to see what we actually mean by “made in America” versus — you’ve got buy America, you’ve gotten buy American, you’ve been made in America — and how they play out in the contracting process. There has been a lot more emphasis. When I was GSA Administrator, we launched the “Made in America bot” so that we could go through the schedules and quickly figure out where we had problems with incorrect labeling of Made in America. I want to make clear, it’s something that GSA and other agencies have always focused on in complying with the law, but to call that directly in the PMA suggests that there’s going to be an even greater focus on this.

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