Some deals offering federal agencies significantly discounted access to software are set to expire at the end of the month. #
The Trump administration should publish a consolidated inventory of discounted software offerings that highlights expiration dates, expected price hikes and agency participation, a Tuesday industry whitepaper recommends, and contractors should provide agencies with “timely renewal estimates and anticipated consumption costs” before discounted software prices end.
The recommendation is among the four the Center for Procurement Advocacy — a group whose membership includes Amazon, CGI, Cisco, Google Cloud, Microsoft and Oracle — is issuing before several popular OneGov deals are due to expire at the end of the month.
The OneGov program offers federal agencies discounted access to software, such as ChatGPT, thanks to the buying power of the government as a whole. A General Services Administration official said in August that some companies have already agreed to extend OneGov offerings while others are in the process of forging new deals. GSA has yet to publicly announce which companies are extending OneGov deals but the agency has signaled it wants the initiative to expand to products beyond software.
GSA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Should OneGov discounts end or be phased out, “agencies that adopted AI at nominal or deeply discounted prices will then face recurring costs for enterprise licenses, cloud capacity, cybersecurity, data engineering, training, and model usage,” the Center for Procurement Advocacy warns in the paper.
“The result could be a contraction in federal AI use. Some agencies were cautious from the outset because they were uncertain how pilots would be funded after introductory offers ended. Without a planned transition, agencies may keep deployments small, postpone expansion, or discontinue tools that have demonstrated value simply because the budget did not anticipate the post-discount costs,” it adds.
Amid uncertainty over the future of the OneGov, the Center for Procurement Advocacy is urging agencies to identify successful AI deployments, estimate how much they would cost after discounts expire and incorporate them in fiscal year 2027 operating plans and future budget submissions to Congress. Lawmakers, in turn, should consider those deployments in full-year appropriations.
“If there are certain deals where [agencies] have seen increased productivity, service delivery or cost savings, those should be prioritized,” Tim Brennan, president of the Center for Procurement Advocacy, told Nextgov/FCW.
Agencies should assess the benefits of AI capabilities before deciding to renew technology, the paper adds. Those assessments should identify “mission owner, problem being solved, number of users or transactions, security and governance status, expected full-price cost and measurable benefit.”
The Trump administration should give agencies an off-ramp for discounted technology by allowing them to procure from a set of integrated AI platform providers rather than a large number of specific models, the paper recommends. The proposal could address concerns that agencies that have used OneGov discounts for enterprise-wide adoption will be locked into using a specific technology once deals lapse.
The Center for Procurement Advocacy’s approach "would allow agencies to apply common compliance, governance, security, and operational practices across many models under unified service levels and predictable, transparent billing, enabling constrained budgets to deliver substantially greater capability," the paper says. "Because the underlying workloads, containers, models, data, and frameworks remain portable, agencies gain these manageability benefits while reducing the risk of model or vendor lock-in and retaining the freedom to change models or infrastructure providers as mission needs and acquisition strategies evolve."