From a Small Business Owner that has been denied Selling to The Government Regarding GSA FSSI – Federal Strategic Sourcing Initiative As a taxpayer I find it impossible to believe GSA's assumption that eliminating competition will create cost-savings for this $100+ Billion Dollar agency. A Congressional appointed non-biased independent research team using American corporate "REAL" world techniques should analyze GSA's questionable cost-savings "Math" and also analyze gsaadvantage.gov sales and other "REAL" available data to prove competition saves more money vs. eliminating competition via utilizing a few "Hand-Picked" FSSI vendors. This analysis should include present and the past 3 years of sales. The Government GSA Schedules have existed for many years in a highly competitive environment utilizing up to 18,000 vendor companies. As an American taxpayer I would like to see GSA have wide open competitive schedules utilizing all current open competition schedule vendors mentioned above and do away with the uncompetitive FSSI procurement solution also called Federal Strategic Sourcing Initiative that utilizes only a handful of vendors. As an American taxpayer I am perplexed why GSA a $100+ Billion Dollar agency is claiming they are unable to handle 18,000 vendors that supply common everyday store items, common services and other business needs while most major corporations can easily handle billions of customers worldwide and simultaneously have the ability to monitor unlimited supplier vendors via various computer systems. GSA needs an enhanced open competition procurement solution that does not use taxpayer money and increases already existing vendor schedule fees to maintain a 21st Century GSA competitive procurement environment. GSA should obtain capable independent software engineers and other relevant experts capable of automating as many manual tasks as possible done by current GSA employees and any independent or dependent associates, hence to obtain a goal of maintaining 10,000’s of vendors and government buyers. To further increase efficiency all current software systems should be analyzed and improved or recreated and/or create additional software systems to improve productivity, hence automating audit systems, computerizing all possible human manual tasks and the utilization and implementation of other up-to-date 21st Century productive methodologies. Eliminating competition via FSSI is not a logical cost saving solution. I would like to see non-biased independent experts analyze GSA’s entire manual work flow and introduce and implement automated and other 21st Century solutions making the GSA agency more productive with a leaner workforce, hence saving taxpayer dollars. This is how "real" taxpayer money can be saved. YEAR AFTER YEAR! Federal Strategic Sourcing Initiative should not be considered similar to corporate volume purchasing. Companies such as Walmart utilize up to 66,000 vendor suppliers & growing daily while the FSSI procurement solution eliminates competition. Numerous other examples can be given. During the interim given lawmakers, White House, GSA, OMB and other concerned government agencies should immediately cease implementing and using FSSI and go back to using the previous open competition schedule procurement methodologies. Congressional Lawmakers should immediately create and implement legislation to make this a reality. Thank you so much for this opportunity to present our Red, White & Blue Procurement Solution. http://gsa.bravesites.com/about

The Democratic Party needs to re-evaluate if our President and the party is heading all of us in the right way. The White House proposal for nearly all tax increases and debt limit increases is so counter productive. Our President rightly didn't want to increase the middle class tax burden so we'd have money to spend, ie the status quo. Would he not think that the hiring class or investing class would also not spend because of their increased cost burden. Hiring will slow down and inflation will rise as these costs are passed to all of us. But, then he also proposed no debt reduction. We have had budget deficits ever since 2008. Not one of his budget proposals has passed our Congress. As one citizen, I want to tell your party leadership of my disapointment in our national leadership.