Dr. Allan V. Burman is President of Jefferson Solutions (Solutions), the government consulting practice of the Jefferson Consulting Group. Under his leadership, Solutions provides analysis, evaluation, program management and acquisition assistance and assessment services to many government departments and agencies. Dr. Burman advises firms, Congressional committees, federal and state agencies and international bodies on acquisition matters. He has testified before Congress over forty-five times on a variety of management issues during his career.
Dr. Burman has led many of Solutions’ acquisition assistance efforts, with a focus on performance-based acquisitions and assessments to improve agencies’ acquisition functions. He has worked with numerous agencies, including, among others, the Departments of Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, State, Treasury and Veterans Affairs as well as the US Agency for International Development.
Prior to joining the firm, Dr. Burman had a lengthy career in the Federal government, serving in policy positions in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and in the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB). As a career Senior Executive Service Chief of the Air Force Branch in OMB’s National Security Division, he was awarded the Presidential Rank Award of Meritorious Executive. This award honors high-performing senior career employees for “sustained extraordinary accomplishment.”
As Administrator for Federal Procurement Policy in OMB under Presidents Reagan, Bush and Clinton, a Senate-confirmed position, Dr. Burman authored the 1991 policy letter that established “performance-based contracting” as the favored approach for contract reform. He also authored the 1992 policy letter that encouraged agencies to make greater use of past performance. Both of these documents reinforce the shift in federal management practices from an emphasis on procedure to a focus on outcomes.
Dr. Burman served for a year as a Federal Executive Fellow at the Brookings Institution, was a six-year columnist for Government Executive magazine, writing its end-piece Federal Marketplace column, and also served as an adjunct professor in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA), a Director and immediate past nine-term Chairman of the Procurement Round Table, a Fellow and Member of the Board of Advisors of the National Contract Management Association (NCMA), a Senior Advisor to Government Executives (SAGE) at the Partnership for Public Service and an Honorary Member of the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA). He is also a member of Washington’s Cosmos Club.
Dr. Burman has served on a number of Presidentially and Congressionally established panels aimed at reforming Federal acquisition practices, including the Section 800 panel, the SARA panel and the Section 809 Commission. In 2009 he received a Federal 100 award in recognition of his contributions to the Federal information technology community and in 2018 he received NCMA’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the 20,000-member Association’s highest honor.
Dr. Burman holds a PhD from The George Washington University, a Master’s degree from Harvard University, was a Fulbright Scholar at the Institute of Political Studies, University of Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France, and graduated Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa from Wesleyan University.