Other Transaction Authority Usage Across the Fedral Government
Abstract
The federal government’s use of Other Transaction Authority (OTA) agreements has exploded in recent years, thanks in large part to a surge in popularity within the Department of Defense (DoD). Neither a contract, grant, or a cooperative agreement, OTAs are an acquisition approach that enable certain federal agencies to access goods and services outside of the traditional acquisition system. Unlike contracts, grants, and cooperative agreements, OTAs are not subject to the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) and a host of other standard regulations. While OTAs give DoD and 10 other federal agencies with OTA authority more flexibility than the traditional FAR-based approach, different laws restrict these agencies authority to enter OTA for only a specific set of activities, largely around research and development (R&D). Of note, while these 11 federal agencies each have some form of OTA authority, each agency is governed under a different OTA authority that restricts their OTA usage to specific activities. While the mechanisms and legal authorities guiding OTAs have become more well-known and better understood in recent years as OTAs have gained in popularity, there is inadequate information about how federal agencies are spending taxpayers’ dollars using OTAs. Using the publicly available data from the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS), this study would examine the trends in OTA usage across the federal government. This analysis would provide critical insight about what federal agencies are using OTAs for, how they are spending under an OTA, and what types of companies are the largest recipients of OTA obligations. Furthermore, this proposed research effort could help establish metrics as to whether agencies are using OTAs to meet their stated objective, such as attracting non-traditional vendors that might not do business with the federal government otherwise. The proposed research effort would proceed in four stages. In the first stage, the study team will build a dataset of federal OTA trends from FPDS and other data sources and begin reviewing the academic literature on OTAs. The second stage focuses on validating the FPDS dataset using tools and processes developed in previous CSIS quantitative study efforts, as well as formulating hypotheses. The third stage combines data from the previous tasks to test hypotheses and identify key finding through synthetizing results from the literature review and the OTA dataset. Finally, this research effort concludes by finalizing the development of and publishing its data visualizations in order to illustrate, educate, and inform policymakers, the private sector and the public about the key findings from this research effort.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Jun 17, 2020
- Source ID
- HQ00342010015
Entities
People
- Andrew Hunter
Organizations
- Center for Strategic and International Studies
- Office of the Secretary of Defense
- Washington Headquarters Services