“The Federal Strategic Sourcing Initiative (FSSI) will have a significant adverse economic impact upon distributors, manufacturers, and other vendors of jan/san products to the federal government,” according to ISSA Legislative Affairs Director Bill Balek.

Under the FSSI, U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) is working with the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and all federal government agencies to create 10 new government‐wide Federal Strategic Sourcing programs for commonly purchased products and services. One of these new programs will be for janitorial and sanitation (jan/san) and maintenance, repair and operation (MRO) supplies and services.  

While the FSSI is expected to result in savings to the federal government, ISSA anticipates this initiative will result in a drastic reduction in jan/san vendors on the GSA schedule, with resulting economic losses. More importantly, the economic impact is expected to go far beyond GSA vendors. OMB intends to make the FSSI mandatory for the seven government agencies that collectively spend 90 percent of the annual $539 billion in overall federal government spending.

Bottom line:  Under the FSSI, ISSA predicts that the number of GSA jan/san vendors will be drastically reduced. Further, if you are not a GSA scheduled vendor, you will be locked out of doing business with the federal government completely.

ISSA will participate in the jan/san pre-industry solicitation meeting to be conducted by GSA on May 15 in Washington, DC.  One of the association’s goals is to require that a cost benefit analysis be conducted to assess the anticipated negative economic consequences of the FSSI jan/san initiative in the private sector.

ISSA encourages those companies that currently sell jan/san products and supplies to the federal government to let ISSA know how your business would be economically impacted if it lost all of its federal business. Please send your estimate of such economic losses to Bill Balek, ISSA, bill@issa.com, by May 13.

For more information, please visit www.issa.com/fssi.