Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C. – chair of the House Oversight Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, IT, and Government Innovation – is probing the General Services Administration’s (GSA) chief information officer (CIO) after the agency’s inspector general (IG) found that it had purchased Chinese-manufactured videoconference cameras with known security vulnerabilities.
Rep. Mace is requesting additional information from GSA’s CIO David Shive after the agency’s internal watchdog flagged last month that GSA employees provided “egregiously flawed” information to acquire 150 videoconference cameras in 2022 that were manufactured in China, and therefore not compliant with the Trade Agreements Act of 1979 (TAA).
“This procurement is especially concerning given GSA’s broader procurement footprint within the federal government,” Rep. Mace wrote in the Feb. 14 letter.
“The OIG report would be troubling enough if the buyer were any federal agency,” she added. “But GSA is not any federal agency; it is the federal government’s purchasing agent, buying tens of billions of dollars of information technology products and services annually on behalf of other agencies through the Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) vehicles administered by GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service (FAS).”
According to the Jan. 23 IG report, employees in GSA’s Office of Digital Infrastructure Technologies “misled a contracting officer with egregiously flawed information to acquire 150 Chinese-made, TAA-noncompliant videoconference cameras” and “provided misleading market research in support of the TAA-noncompliant cameras and failed to disclose that comparable TAA-compliant alternatives were available.”
The congresswoman is requesting Shive answer half a dozen questions and provide relevant documents by Feb. 23 – in advance of an anticipated subcommittee hearing on Feb. 29.
Specifically, Mace wants to know how the agency passed over alternative camera equipment that complied with current Federal standards and what actions were taken against staff that provided misleading data on the cameras.
