As the Biden administration strives to inject sustainability policies into government buying practices, the General Services Administration (GSA) is establishing a new Federal advisory committee to look at issues of climate and sustainability in Federal procurement.
Laura Stanton, the assistant commissioner for the Office of Information Technology Category at GSA, explained that the Government Acquisition Policy Federal Advisory Committee will focus on sustainability. The committee will advise the agency on acquisition tools and authorities to target sustainability initiatives.
“We’ll be continuing those conversations and looking at how we continue to both understand the opportunities that sustainability brings, and the opportunity to integrate those into future acquisitions,” Stanton said at the GITEC Emerging Technology conference on May 3. “We will be working with our suppliers to address climate change and risk in the delivery of critical products and services to the federal customer base,” she said.
Stanton added that GSA will soon be looking for insight and input on the new committee’s work.
“When we begin to talk about things such as transitioning to the cloud, not only are we talking about the capabilities, the scalability, we also are beginning to integrate the importance of sustainability into that,” Stanton said.
In addition, GSA is implementing environmental requirements into major contracts and strategic solutions vehicles for computers and laptops, Stanton said. She also highlighted efforts by GSA to work with the Defense Department through the Defense Enterprise Office Solutions – an effort that she said “enables [DoD] to reduce their physical footprint of on-premises infrastructure.”
The Biden administration laid down sustainability goals in a 2021 executive order that committed the government to achieve net-zero emissions for federal procurement and government operations by 2050.
