We're very fast. We don't have to reinvent the wheel. We can get a contract in a couple of days. But the Southeast CASU, which has three federal agencies and seven state and local officials on the local CASU board, ran into legal trouble after selling services to state and local customers off the General Services Administration supply schedule. CASUs were permitted to buy off the supply schedule for state and local customers following the 1996 Cooperative Purchasing Act, but Congress repealed the law in 1997 after complaints that CASUs were competing with private businesses.
Nothing is to be bought off the supply schedule for state and local governments.
The rules could become even more stringent under a proposed Office of Management and Budget policy revision that would further limit the federal government's ability to do business with states and localities, CASU officials say. The legal change has had a chilling effect on CASUs that otherwise would have pursued state and local contracts, says Mariley Ferens, a member of the national CASU staff and director of the first CASU, which began in Seattle in 1986. While few dispute the merits of the CASU concept, there have been implementation problems. At their high point in the early 1990s, about 50 CASUs were in business, although some were loosely defined, according to national board members and staff. The board last year decertified 21 CASUs that either had merged with other units or franchises, had ceased operating or were being subsidized by their lead agency because they were losing money.