Founder of Reston Tech Firm Nominated to Head GSA

The founder of a high-tech company in Northern Virginia has been nominated to be the next head of the General Services Administration.

Lurita Alexis Doan , if approved by the Senate, will take control of an agency that has been without a permanent administrator since October and is in the middle of a reorganization. Since the departure of Bush appointee Stephen Perry , the GSA has been run by David L. Bibb , a career executive who has served as the acting administrator.

Doan founded New Technology Management Inc., which has its headquarters in Reston. A spokeswoman for the company said Doan had asked that requests for information and interviews be directed to the White House.

According to the company's Web site, New Technology held contracts with federal agencies valued at $212 million in 2003. The site lists the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force and departments of Homeland Security and Housing and Urban Development as clients.

Doan sold her company in July and has since spent much of her time working on the search committee for a new president of Vassar College and on projects for the Shakespeare Theatre Company here, White House spokeswoman Erin Healy said.

Bobbie Kilberg , president of the Northern Virginia Technology Council, said Doan "is an extraordinarily good manager." Kilberg said: "She is a leader and she knows a lot about technology. GSA is clearly losing its edge . . . and needs innovation. She is a creative thinker."

Doan, born in 1958 in New Orleans, is a 1979 graduate of Vassar and earned a master's degree in Renaissance literature at the University of Tennessee. Doan has taught courses at Washington area colleges, including Marymount and Catholic, Healy said.

In a 2003 article in Profiles in Diversity Journal, Doan wrote that she started her company with $25,000 and no business experience, "except from the lessons passed down from three generations of women and men in my family working in their own businesses." She wrote, "We have been a family of entrepreneurs from the time of my great grandmother, a free black, who sold pralines in New Orleans in the 1860s."

Doan also wrote in the journal's November-December 2003 issue that she believes in being politically active. She said she gave company employees three hours of paid leave each election day to cast their votes.

Data on the Political Money Line Web site show that Doan has been a steady contributor to Republicans in the 2000 to 2006 election cycles. In 2004, for example, Doan contributed $25,000 to the Republican National Committee and $2,000 to the Bush-Cheney campaign, according to the Web site.

Doan, if confirmed, will probably need the help of Congress and the White House to turn around GSA. The agency buys more than $30 billion of goods and services each year from the private sector and resells them to federal agencies. But it has been hit with declining revenue, in part because of inappropriate contracting activities that had to be corrected and that hampered its ability to meet the needs of the Pentagon and other large agencies.

The agency has announced plans to offer cash buyouts and early retirements to more than 400 employees at the Federal Supply Service and the Federal Technology Service. The GSA plans to consolidate the two bureaus into a "federal acquisition service." The merger has been approved by the House and is under study in the Senate.

Paid Parental Leave

Three House members have introduced legislation to provide federal employees with six weeks of paid parental leave for the birth of a child or an adoption. Currently, federal employees use vacation and sick leave to care for newborns.

The bill sponsors are Reps. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.), Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.) and Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.). Maloney has introduced similar bills in past years, only to see them blocked by the Office of Personnel Management, which contends that the government provides a generous leave package and that adding paid parental leave would not improve recruitment and retention in the federal service.

But Maloney, in a statement, said the government "is woefully behind the times in its family leave policies" and said the current policy "isn't very family friendly."

Federal employees in their first few years of service often say they run short of vacation and sick leave when they take time off for a newborn or an adoption.

Stephen Barr's email address isbarrs@washpost.com.