How the Industry Advisory Council Got its Ears

How the Industry Advisory Council Got its Ears

[NOTE: This is perhaps the only blog on ACT-IAC that will be posted that is more rumor and innuendo than observed fact. It is however, a Good Story, and may be completely true, and it is part of the lore from the early days of the Industry Advisory Council. Corrections, denials, and alternate versions are welcomed from anyone with a better story.]

In 1991, H.R. 3161 was introduced by William Conyers, House Government Operations Committee Chairman. The legislation was a mishmash of new rules, including the stipulation that GSA fully compete any and all acquisitions with a total value in excess of $1000.00 – including schedule buys. It would lay an ponderous burden on contractors and agency procurement staff. Because it was a Conyers pet project, the bill had gained acquiescence from a wide spectrum of industry advocates – no one wanted to thwart potent and vindictive Conyers. So AFCEA, ITAA, NAM, ADAPSO, EIA, and everyone else in town voiced no protest.

IAC was initially a pretty Small Deal – it took most of 1990 to enlist the 20 charter member companies, and growth was a slow process. The first Executive Leadership Conference attracted about 140 attendees to Charlottesville. And there was frankly not much else going on in IAC. The second ELC (1992) was fundamentally an acquisition colloquium, and one of the workshop topics encompassed pending legislation to reform procurement. ELC was a success, in terms of audience satisfaction and intense discourse. One of the byproducts of the conference was a published “Proceedings.”  Each of the workshops included a recorder, taking notes compiled into a brief treatise distributed to attendees and press, with no attribution of comments or identification of discussants. 

At ELC, the impacts that H.R. 3161 would have on contracting personnel on both sides of the fence was widely recognized, and it was discussed in a procurement workshop in less than salutary terms. That spirit was reflected in the Proceedings. While companies and their trade groups would not vocally object to HR 3161, everyone knew that it included inopportune requirements.

One of the pointed Capitol Hill news publications – it could have been Role Call or the National Journal– acquired the Proceedings and published a story that noted the broad support for HR 3161, with solely the tiny upstart IAC expressing any reservations about the wisdom of the GSA restriction. While no one cared much about the Proceedings from a conference of less than 150 participants, or the opinion of an association with less than 50 members, IAC had inadvertently been branded as an opponent of the Conyers bill.

And the bill failed. It never made it to the House floor for a vote.

With no one else visible, pundits assumed that the IAC opposition had been instrumental in defeating the potent committee chair, and IAC became noteworthy in the press. While strictly barred from lobbying, and actually endorsing no position on any legislation, IAC was abruptly more interesting to the federal IT Trade Press, based on anonymous remarks made in off-the-record discourse.

You know what they say about assumptions.

The actual story of the defeat of HR3161 was entirely different, and engendered no backlash from Conyers to IAC. An ascendant House leader from Louisiana had a wish for a commemorative coin to honor Louis Armstrong, who had died twenty years earlier. That congressman – let’s say it was Bob Livingston, who was designated Speaker of the House in 1996 – blamed Conyers for the defeat of that proposal, and quashed HR 3161 in retribution. Conyers probably never knew that IAC had been posited as an opponent of his bill, which encompassed a diversity of rules more substantial than the competition rider. But IAC was quietly elevated, and membership began to grow, especially after the more ensconced trade associations had poorly represented the wishes of those companies in the GSA matter.

To be sure, the details on this are a bit hazy to me after nearly 25 years. I’m not sure if it was Livingston who confounded Conyers’ bill, or where the story of IAC opposition originated. It was a story quietly told in IAC circles, relayed from member-company legislative coordinators and lobbyists. Call it apocryphal – I cannot promise that it is any more than a story I heard at the time. But it does add some spice to our history.