Lurita Doan, Buying for the Government at Highest Possible Prices
There’s an outfit called the General Services Administration (GSA) that’s been around since Harry Truman signed the legislation in 1949. It was organized to buy pencils and desks and ‘general services’ for the federal bureaucracy at the best possible price. Someone in the Congress thought that because the fed was a big buyer, it ought to get a good price.
There’s an outfit called the General Services Administration (GSA) that’s been around since Harry Truman signed the legislation in 1949. It was organized to buy pencils and desks and ‘general services’ for the federal bureaucracy at the best possible price. Someone in the Congress thought that because the fed was a big buyer, it ought to get a good price.
Wal-Mart in Washington, Harry style.
And it worked pretty well. Until 1994, when Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America decided that the GSA’s contracting with vendors could be (and should be) a profit-center. Those were the heady days of privatizing government and making it smaller.
The…