GSA procurement chief leads FAR overhaul

Jeffrey Koses is the senior procurement executive at the General Services Administration. Courtesy: GSA Jeffrey Koses paced the floor of his home in the middle of the night in 1995, trying to get his newborn son back to sleep by talking him through potential responses to a stack of procurement protests waiting on his desk.Somewhere in those 2 a.m. conversations, three ideas took hold. The government needed to communicate better with industry to avoid protests. The workforce shouldn’t be stuck working 16-hour days just to keep up. And technology should make the job easier, not harder.Today, as the senior procurement executive at the General Services Administration, Koses applies those same principles to one of the government’s most ambitious acquisition reforms: the Revolutionary Federal Acquisition Regulation Overhaul.Koses’ path into federal acquisition wasn’t planned. With a degree in history and political science and “no clue” what to do next, he landed in a GSA management development program buying furniture for the federal government.“I found the mission was just fascinating, because GSA is the behind-the-scenes engine that keeps the rest of government working,” he said. “Any initiative that I saw going on in the country, any story in the paper, I would find