GSA, NASA, DOT Officials Share New AI Procurement Strategies - ExecutiveGov

Ah, marvellous. The United States federal government has discovered that its procurement machine — honed over decades to buy office chairs and fighter jets with all the speed of continental drift — is not ideally suited to acquiring software that rewrites itself every Tuesday. GSA, NASA and DOT officials have now shared their new AI procurement strategies, which is bureaucrat-speak for "we have noticed the horse has bolted and are drafting a memo about stable doors." The conventional technology buying approach, they solemnly report, is struggling to keep pace with AI.

This is the procurement equivalent of a man standing on the tracks observing that the train is approaching rather fast and proposing a committee to look into faster shoe leather. One imagines the acquisition shop insisting that the frontier model be delivered via a different kind of cart. The phrase "faster, more flexible acquisition paths" is doing heroic work, given that the federal government's idea of speed is a GAO audit and its idea of flexibility is a waiver requiring four signatures and a sacrificial offering.

The tragedy is that the officials are not wrong: the gap between gavel-and-paper buying and the silicon rocket ship is now so wide you could drive a CHIPS Act subsidy through it. NASA wants AI for mission planning, DOT for traffic, GSA for literally everything, and the procurement system will be tying itself in knots over data rights and security clearances while the models get smarter. Still, credit where due — at least the acronyms are on message. GSA, NASA, DOT: the alphabet soup has finally found a problem it cannot buy its way out of with a firm-fixed-price contract. By the time the request for proposals hits the Federal Register, the models will have moved on to something we haven't even imagined.