Three recent solicitations offer an interesting glimpse into the Trump administration’s influence on federal procurement.

From the overhaul of the Federal Acquisition Regulations to the push for consolidation and centralization to the focus on modernizing back office systems, these three requests for proposals demonstrate how agencies are implementing and accepting the Office of Management and Budget’s prioritization of reforming federal technology and acquisition management.

The one thing that these solicitations also remind us all about is they mostly are hidden behind the federal firewall called eBuy. I will spare you my typical soap box rant, but here is previous tirade in case you want to join me in this crusade for more transparency.

The Commerce Department’s new cloud vehicle is embodying several of the administration’s goals. First, it’s consolidating multiple cloud contracts across Commerce into one blanket purchase agreement.

Second, the 10-year contract with a ceiling of more than $4.1 billion is going out as a BPA under the General Services Administration’s schedules contract, utilizing the deviation in the FAR letting agencies create BPAs on top of multiple award vehicles.

Finally, Commerce is embracing the push to contract directly with providers instead of using system integrators or resellers. Commerce calls this the “direct to cloud service provider” approach.

“Due to highly specialized technical requirements, including massive compute elasticity (25,000+ concurrent vCPUs), proprietary 100+ Tbps global backbones, and specific hardware density for AI/ML and weather modeling, the Department is utilizing a Direct-to-CSP strategy. It is contemplated that to ensure mission success and direct engineering support, only Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) acting as the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) will be eligible for award,” the agency stated in the posting on SAM.gov.

Due to the fact Commerce is releasing the RFP only through the schedules, it’s difficult to gain any more insight into what they are specifically buying (see rant above).

But Matheus Passos, acting chief technology officer at Commerce, said at the recent Emerging Technology and Innovation conference sponsored by ACT-IAC, that the agency already is leaning heavily into using GSA’s offerings like the USAI platform.

“It’s difficult to defend the approach of having different contracts with different prices and terms,” Passos said. “We are driving toward the idea of one Commerce for common IT services like cloud computing. We want to have the flexibility needed for how we buy and use cloud services.”

Cloud computing is one of Commerce’s biggest areas of spend under its IT budget, costing more than $129 million in 2025. Commerce’s fiscal 2025 IT budget request was $2.9 billion with about $2.1 billion going for operations and maintenance of existing systems.

To develop the consolidated contract, Passos said Commerce created an agencywide working group led by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“The working group was part of finding a center of excellence in one of the bureaus that has the expertise and motivation to lead this consolidation effort,” he said. “We see this effort as low-hanging fruit to drive cost efficiencies and reduce overhead across the department.”

Like Commerce, Treasury is releasing a BPA on top of the GSA Schedule for a contractor to lead the effort to consolidate disparate core financial management systems into a single instance for all of Treasury and as many as 34 other agencies ranging from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to the National Archives and Records Administration to the Consumer Product Safety Commission and a host of micro agencies.

The Bureau of Fiscal Service is leading this effort, called OneFM, required under President Donald Trump’s March 2025 executive order calling for, among other things, the consolidation of agency financial systems.

Treasury says its goal is “to procure a standardized, FM quality service management office (QSMO)-approved software-as-a-service (SaaS) core financial management solution, known as ‘OneFM,’ and the associated implementation, operations and sustainment services in support of the OneFM enterprise financial management modernization effort.”

Treasury estimates it will spend more than $987.8 million on this entire effort to replace existing financial management systems from Oracle, SAP and one other that the IRS developed in house.

Like what the Office of Personnel Management is doing around human resources systems, Treasury intends to make a single award with a one-year base and nine one-year options.

“OneFM aims to strengthen fraud prevention, reduce waste, and improve the stewardship of federal funds,” Treasury wrote. “[It also will] maximize the utilization of current and future automation and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to reduce manual workload, improve reconciliation speed and increase data quality.”

The consolidation of financial management systems across almost three dozen agencies likely is a precursor to a larger effort of bringing more agencies under a single core system. Will Treasury try to create one system to rule them all? That is still to be determined, but the administration is sending some pretty clear signals around its goals.

The third solicitation that continues this theme is from GSA’s Technology Transformation Service. The Next-Generation IT Solutions (NEXT) BPA, which I wrote about back in February – see rant above – moved into the solicitation stage and vendors are excited. Sources say contractors submitted over 700 questions pushing GSA to extend the due date so they could parse through them and answer them all.

NEXT is both a single award and multiple award BPA on top of both the schedules and Alliant 3, again using the new authorities outlined in the FAR overhaul and taking advantage of the best-in-class governmentwide acquisition contract.

• DevSecOps and secure modern development
• Digital services and experience design and delivery
• Cloud, infrastructure and cybersecurity services
• Digital identity and fraud protection
• Artificial intelligence strategy and implementation

GSA says the five-year contract has a ceiling of $700 million. TTS is limiting the number of categories vendors can bid on to two and will make no more than five awards for DevSecOps, cloud and AI, while it will make only one award under digital services and one under digital identity functional areas. GSA will solicit bids for cloud, infrastructure and cybersecurity services under Alliant 3, while the rest will be through the schedules.

Additionally, TTS is taking advantage of several innovative procurement techniques, again highlighted and detailed in the FAR overhaul and practitioners albums.

“To increase transparency of the techniques with industry, some of the techniques that may be used are listed in the bulleted list below. The government may or may not use these techniques and may use additional innovative techniques that are not included in the list. The Periodic Table of Acquisition Innovations (PTAI) PDF Playbook (as well as the website – The Periodic Table of Acquisition Innovations (PTAI)! | Acquisition Gateway), includes information sharing the description, problems solved, benefits of use, small business benefit and real sample documents, for each,” the RFP stated.

These innovative techniques include:

• Fusion procurement
• Multi-phased quote submission and evaluation
• Advisory down-selects
• Rates only for pricing evaluations (ROPE)
• Confidence ratings

Bids on TTS Next are due May 22.

These three acquisitions, and probably many others, are demonstrating just how the changes to the FAR and the administration’s prioritization of consolidation and centralization are taking hold. As with any reform, writing the policy tends to be the easy part. The hard part is actually implementing it. These solicitations are a sign of change. Now if we could only do something about that ebuy wall – tear it down!

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