Five Systemic Ways to Radically Reform Procurement to Improve Government Services (Reilly Martin)

The time for fundamental change in U.S. procurement is now.

Despite one-in-three dollars being spent on public procurement, government agencies at the federal, state, and local levels don’t seem to know what they’re buying or from whom. Procurement has long failed to deliver real value for communities, and existing inequities and inefficiencies have only been exacerbated by the pandemic.

It doesn’t have to be like this; we need to buy better to build back better. We need to think differently and reimagine both the purpose and entire process of procurement. A system in which we work together to plan and deliver services not only for communities, but with communities.

We see five key opportunities to do this:

• Design for equity and inclusion: Make procurement at all levels of government more equitable and easier to access by putting the needs of the community at the center of contract outreach, design, and management, particularly for small, medium, women, and/or minority businesses. The City of Austin estimates that doing procurement differently could result in over 40 percent of the city’s contract spending going to historically disadvantaged or excluded businesses, versus less than 10 percent currently.
• Focus on green sustainability as a baseline requirement: Build more green and fair supply chains by not only changing what governments buy, but how they use innovation and data to promote carbon reduction and better jobs. The City of Des Moines is changing how it will buy by reforming its local procurement ordinance, policies, and processes, while incorporating goals for increased outreach and contracts with local companies with their own sustainability and equity goals.
• Purchase for best value, not only lowest cost: Move beyond solely selecting the lowest cost good or service and evaluate bids based on the best partner or product, particularly when buying for good or services that directly affect people’s lives, such as nutritious food in Philadelphia or buying technology that manages social services in the State of Colorado.
• Open up contracting and spend data: Provide public access to data and decisions about where taxpayer money is being spent on projects from planning through implementation. The Open Contracting Data Standard can help and has led to change. San Mateo County, Calif., and cities in the county spend $750 million, and could be saving at least $108 million a year by just sharing and coordinating better within the county on purchases.
• Go digital: Let’s not take existing paper-based, analog transactions online, but rather rethink the entire business process behind procurement for the digital environment to simplify and automate routine tasks and improve decision making. One of the biggest misconceptions that government makes is that businesses want to do business with them. But businesses won’t unless they see governments shift focus to an improved user experience for procurement that makes it fairer and faster to participate.

Done better, public procurement can be a lever for change; left unchanged, it will be more of a brake. So, let’s think big and partner to move public procurement from a paper-based, compliance-driven chore that benefits the few, to an open, results-driven, digital service that delivers value for all.