Marty Wagner announces retirement
By David Hubler
Published on January 8, 2007
Marty Wagner, deputy commissioner of the General Services Administration’s Federal Acquisition Service, has announced his retirement, effective Jan. 31.
Wagner was instrumental in the agency’s plan to create FAS by merging GSA’s two procurement offices, the Federal Supply Service and the Federal Technology Service. He said at the time that the consolidation would help improve the way GSA purchases technology and other goods and services because the merger would create “economies of process.”
Wagner told Federal Computer Week today that he decided to retire because FAS is on a solid foundation and GSA has overcome many of the problems it faced in the past few years.
“There is now a strong senior management team in place,” he said, “and I feel that I have been able to help and assist in the transition, and that it’s now time to do something different.”
He said he wants to devote the remaining weeks of his government career to GSA before making any definite plans about his future.
He said he plans to take the next two or three months “to decompress, look at options, talk to people and figure out what to do next.” But he said he would not just go into the sunset and lie on a beach. “I may do that for a week at some point in that process,” he added.
Wagner will have been in government for 31 years, the past 16 at GSA, when he retires.
He said he will remain involved in government activities and would like to do many similar things in the private sector.
“After [Jan. 31], I will be looking presumably at various firms involved in technology and management in the federal government,” he said. “I will try to speak to them about potential opportunities there.”
Wagner praised GSA’s current efforts to help federal agencies. “The role [of GSA] is there,” he said. “There are a lot of very strong, good people there. There have been some problems in the past, but I have confidence that with the good value proposition and the good people here, we’re going to continue to deliver more value” to agency customers.
“If you actually look at the way corporations are restructuring themselves, there is a lot more use of shared services and strategic sourcing, and all of those are exactly what we do,” he added.
Asked to cite one area GSA still needs to work on, he said, “I think we need to continue to put a lot more effort and focus on agency customers.”
He said GSA has done a lot of work fixing internal processes and making things run better, but he added that the reorganization won’t mean much if customers don’t see and experience the improvements GSA has made.
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