Op-Ed: How Congress Could Save an Easy Billion Dollars ASAP

This piece was originally published in The Messenger on June 18, 2023.

The 118th Congress has been defined by tense negotiations over the debt ceiling and haggling over federal spending. With a deal now signed into law, lawmakers should refocus their energy on a smart bipartisan reform bill that offers a clear path to more than $1 billion in annual cost savings across the government.

The Strengthening Agency Management and Oversight of Software Assets (SAMOSA) Act reforms the way the federal government buys technology. The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), notes that SAMOSA “requires agencies to spend their money as if a taxpayer was spending their own money — wisely.” The bill presents a rare bipartisan win for fiscal responsibility at a time when 60% of taxpayers are increasingly concerned about government spending.

The U.S. government is the single largest consumer of information technology products in the world. The government’s IT contracts for services like email, messaging, word processing, and cloud services make up billions of dollars of government spending each year. With such scale, these contracts should represent an opportunity for technology companies large and small to compete to provide innovative products that equip our most critical government agencies with the best and most secure tools possible — while driving significant value for taxpayers.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case.

The full article can be found online here.