OMB POLICY STATEMENTS
OMB to Agencies: Be Smart Shoppers
The OMB has announced a new imperative. All agencies are to use "strategic sourcing". This essentially boils down to a combination of comparison shopping and buying in bulk. The government is the nation's top consumer. The new missive tells agencies that they have to find ways to use their buying power to cut costs. Specifically, each agency must find 3 specific items to save on by January.

"Strategic sourcing is just another example of our efforts to best leverage the government's buying power and to realize the most savings for taxpayers," said David Safavian, an OMB spokesperson.

"They don't have good usage information on what their internal customers are buying, and they're struggling to get that data together," said Jeffrey Hawting, director of federal government services for Office Depot.