OMB Increases Buy America Transparency at AGC’s Request

On August 27, the White House's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) responded to AGC's requestto review the Build America, Buy America Act (BABAA) information collection procedures of 19 different federal agencies. OMB indicated that the 19 agencies, which had been identifiedas out of compliance with all requirements under the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA), have addressed those concerns and are using approved forms for their information collections.

As a reminder, AGC along with a coalition of industry partners, submitted a requestfor OMB to review PRA compliance of various federal agencies. Proper collection practices are necessary in order for agencies to properly assess the need for BABAA waivers on a project-by-project basis or using ones with general applicability for all projects. A recent report,further highlighting the need for transparency, found that the EPA was unable to identify how many award recipients had used the approved waivers in their projects or to quantify how many infrastructure projects were subject to a waiver.

The request submitted by AGC on February 15^th also called for the OMB to amend its BABAA implementation to streamline the waiver process and expedite the time necessary for approvals and denials. OMB did not respond to this portion of the request but indicated that they will respond to that request separately.

Additional actions that AGC has taken to ensure the BABAA regulations do not pose an undue burden on contractors:

For more information, please contact Deniz Mustafa at [email protected].