Fourth Annual DNA Grantees' Workshop

Tuesday, June 24, 2003

Question-and-Answer Session

DR. FORMAN: We'll entertain 5 minutes worth of questions.

DR. BUEL: Regarding Thurston's talk, it sounded like you may be sending people out to the laboratories to help us do this contract. Well, that kind of worries me. Is this going to be a lot of work or what?

DR. FORMAN: It's already way too much work.

DR. BUEL: I mean, I'm just wondering. If it's going to take us a lot of time to do this, maybe we should just do the cases in-house.

DR. FORMAN: Well, the problem for us this year has been that the contracting vehicle itself is fraught with peril. I've been saying this for 2 years now: This first year is going to be really hard. So in order to make sure that we get through this year with everybody getting what they want the first time out, I don't think we're going to be visiting every single State. But we have spent time going to the States, giving them their RFQs to fill out, talking to them about what it is that they want, getting all this paperwork going back and forth, and bringing it to the contracting office.

We're really venturing outside the box on this. The usual way for doing a contract through the Federal Government is to have the contracting officer pick their technical specialists only from within the Federal Government. So the whole idea is a contract from the Federal Government has to be based on best value to the government. Well, if we just left it to the contracting officer, then the best value to the government would be the cheapest test.

I think that that's the situation that a lot of people found themselves in in the year 2000 when you were out there doing your own procurement. We didn't want that program to be based on the lowest dollar. We wanted the value of that program to be based on what the labs wanted; that is, how you wanted to get your data packages back, what platform you wanted, and what date you wanted your stuff sent. If sending stuff on a Tuesday really made it easier for you, we decided early on in this program that we would do anything to support what you needed to make it as easy for you as possible. We were willing to not have a one-price-fits-all or one-size-fits-all approach; we really wanted to customize it to each lab.

We found an obscure rule in contracting that allowed us to invite outside technical experts. That's why we have made each State have its own technical expert, because we argued successfully that the best technical expert you could have for your State would be the best technical expert that you could have for the program, who would be using the services that were procured for the Federal Government at the best value to the Federal Government. So we made this long argument, it won, and that's why this is taking so long.

There are seven steps to complete before we even get to a contracting office. That's because we're being really careful, incredibly careful, so that everybody gets what they want, including the vendors. It's hard for a vendor to give back something to a client that the client didn't really want. At that rate, everybody's working against everybody else. We wanted everybody to be working with everybody.

Next year we expect to take those seven steps and shrink them to four. The following year we expect to add one step: We hand you the government-required RFQ to fill out, then you fill it out and send it to the contracting officer. But until we can get it to that point, it's taking a long time.

On the plus side, for those of you who have samples in your freezer, more than 80 percent of the samples that are in the freezer are actually marching down the path. So we're on the right trajectory. It's just a very slow trajectory.

MS. ROTHOVE: I have a question to Thurston. It seems like the present offender backlog grants promote contracting out to companies. We do our testing in-house, but we would like to see future grants that include equipment.

DR. FORMAN: I probably should answer that because I am the program manager. The grants that are available for in-house analysis are not limited. Any State can apply to do their own in-house analysis as long as they have a minimum of 12,000 samples and analyze at least 1,000 per month. Each State's bottom line has to be equivalent to or better than the average that the vendors are offering on the GSA schedule. You can do anything with that money that you want, just as long as you don't tell us you're going to Bermuda. But again, the bottom line is that you must be able to analyze samples at a cost equal to or better than the vendor's.

MS. ROTHOVE: But the last grant did not include equipment, did it?

DR. FORMAN: You could put in equipment; it didn't say you couldn't. It just wanted to know what you were going to do with the money, especially how many samples you were going to analyze and how much it was going to cost.

MS. ROTHOVE: I thought it had a restriction against equipment.

DR. FORMAN: No. Any other questions?

MS. PAGLIARO: Being new to outsourcing, I'd just like to know the time estimate between getting the paperwork and starting to fill it out or filing that paperwork and getting the contract approved.

DR. FORMAN: This year the time estimate is really long. We've had these numbers in our hat since March and we've gotten one contract awarded so far. I think they're going to start coming a little faster. A lot of them are moving now and coming through in batches. I'm going to be optimistic and say that once we get through this first batch and we find out where all the bugs are, the next batch should take between 6 and 8 months.

MS. PAGLIARO: Thank you.

DR. FORMAN: We'll get it down to an average of 14 months, like if you had done it yourself. Maybe we'll get it down to 13-1/2 months, so it'll be a little better. Anyone else? Thank you very much for your time.

Our next speaker is ready.

For all States that wish to attend, I have been asked to remind you that we are having a meeting on these two backlog reduction programs from 7 to 9 p.m. tonight here in this room.

Terri Long just asked me a question that I knew the answer to, and then I realized that maybe some of you would like to know as well. She asked the question about whether or not you could use any of these funds for collection.

I tried really, really hard to convince the Office of General Counsel that the language of the law allowed this, because it identified that it was for the analysis of convicted offender samples and you can't analyze what you can't afford to collect. I went as high up as I could go. The lawyers, who usually try really hard to let us do what we want to do, were unanimous in their decision that these dollars could only be used for convicted offender analysis, as in once it got to the lab. So I'm sorry. I tried really hard, and we put it in the language of the President's initiative that there will be funding directed to the collection of samples.