Blogs

Government staffing often runs on a different clock than the need it serves. A position opens today, but the ability to fill it can be months away, behind a procurement process that has to run its full course before anyone signs anything. For the government agencies staffing prisons, crisis response teams, and veteran care facilities, that gap between the need and the authority to act on it is where the problem lives.

A licensed practical nurse position sits open at a state prison for six months. A crisis behavioral health team is short two clinicians heading into winter, the season its call volume peaks. In both cases, the delay is rarely caused by staffing firms not finding people. It tends to be about the contract that allows the service to be provided.

Cooperative purchasing often gets pitched as the fix for that delay, and it can be. But treating cooperative purchasing itself as the speed lever misses where the actual time savings comes from. The agreement doesn’t move fast. What speeds up your staffing is not having to conduct a vendor competition.

What Cooperative Purchasing Is

Cooperative purchasing lets one government agency use a contract that another public entity already competed and awarded. Instead of writing a request for proposals (RFP), evaluating bids, and negotiating terms from scratch, a government organization adopts a contract that has already cleared all three steps somewhere else.

A handful of organizations coordinate this, covering a wide range of staffing services, including clinical and behavioral health staffing. Sourcewell, a Minnesota-based public agency, conducts competitive solicitations on behalf of more than 50,000 government, education, and nonprofit members and makes the resulting contracts available to any eligible government agency at no cost. NASPO ValuePoint works similarly but through a lead-state model, where one state runs the solicitation on behalf of others that have signed on to participate. OMNIA Partners operates the same way as well, but for a wider range of sectors.

The distinction from standard procurement isn’t just paperwork. It’s who ran the competition and when. Standard procurement means your government agency runs RFPs as needed for specific demands. But with cooperative purchasing, someone else previously ran the RFP for a similar need, so you are legally permitted to use what was awarded depending on two conditions. Your government agency is a registered member of the cooperative and your state or local procurement rules allow the use of cooperative contracts.

The Benefits of Cooperative Purchasing

Where the Staffing RFP Delay Actually Gets Removed

A full competitive solicitation is not optional under normal procurement rules, and it is not quick. State and local RFP cycles tend to run three to six months from drafting through award, and contested procurements run longer. That time is being spent on steps a cooperative contract has already completed. Aside from the time investment, running a solicitation pulls in procurement staff, subject matter experts, legal review, and an evaluation committee, all of whom have other work. That creates a backlog elsewhere in the organization that can show up as a real expense, whether in lost productivity or in overtime.

Without the RFP, the only items you have left to complete are due diligence and paperwork. Confirm the government agency is an eligible member. Confirm the contract covers the service needed. And sign a participating addendum or equivalent. None of that requires a new competition.

Removing the solicitation, which tends to be the slowest step, is the real driving force that helps cooperative purchasing speed up the procurement process.

Terms You Did Not Have to Negotiate Alone

Speed is the headline, but it is not the only advantage. A cooperative contract was competed by an organization aggregating demand across thousands of government agencies, which gives it leverage a single government agency rarely has on its own. Sourcewell reports directing more than $3 billion a year in purchases through its cooperative contracts. While that figure spans every contract category rather than staffing alone, it reflects the scale of Sourcewell’s cooperative purchasing power.

There is an administrative benefit too. Vendor vetting, reference checks, and compliance review all happened centrally, instead of being repeated by every government agency that later uses the contract. For a smaller office without a large procurement staff, that can turn into substantial time savings because it’s less work.

When the Contract You Have Is the Problem

In addition to the speed and cost benefits, cooperative purchasing can also help when a government agency already holds a staffing contract but is not getting what it needs from its vendor. Under a standard procurement path, the options are to wait out the term or start a new solicitation, which means living with inadequate coverage for a year or more.

Part of why this happens traces back to how the original award was scored. Agencies that weight lowest price technically acceptable, or LPTA, most heavily are selecting on cost rather than on quality of care. That tradeoff does not show up during evaluation. It tends to show up later, in the caliber of the clinicians who walk through the door.

A cooperative contract gives those government agencies a route to bring in a different provider now rather than at the end of the cycle.

Why Speed Matters Most in Government Roles

Every unfilled position at a government agency carries a cost. In corrections and crisis behavioral health, that cost compounds faster, because the roles left open are the ones managing acute risk.

There are real examples to back this up. South Dakota’s Department of Corrections told lawmakers in early 2025 that it was carrying a 53 percent vacancy rate among licensed practical nurses and 40 percent among registered nurses, driven in part by nurses reporting they no longer felt safe on the job. North Carolina’s prison health positions are seeing their highest vacancy rates among nurses, and the state’s corrections secretary told reporters this year that what looked like a crisis eight years ago now reads as ordinary. In California, a state audit found health-related vacancy rates topped 30 percent at three facilities, despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent on pay raises and bonuses meant to close the gap.

None of that gets fixed by a faster contract alone. But it describes the conditions where a six-month procurement cycle stops being a paperwork inconvenience. It is six more months of mandatory overtime and a unit running below the coverage it needs.

How to Find Out If This Applies to You

It’s best to frame cooperative purchasing as a solution to a roadblock, not a starting point. Define the staffing need first, work out what would actually solve it, and turn to contracting once that is what stands in the way. From there, consider the following questions to help determine if cooperative purchasing would be the right move:

• Ask what your government agency already has access to. Many state and local governments have already signed participating addenda for one or more cooperatives. Procurement staff will know which ones, and staffing may already be covered under something your agency has never used.
• Bring the specific need, not the general idea. “Can we use cooperative purchasing for corrections staffing” is harder to act on than “here is a contract number covering clinical staffing that our agency is eligible to use.” Come with the second version if you can find it.
• Ask about scope before assuming coverage. A cooperative contract awarded for general staffing services may or may not extend to specialized clinical or behavioral health roles. Confirm scope early rather than after the paperwork is underway.
• Treat it as a standing option, not a one-time fix. Once a government agency confirms it can use a given cooperative contract, that access does not expire with the current vacancy. It is worth documenting internally so the next urgent opening does not start the same research from zero.

The government agencies that use cooperative purchasing well are not the ones that discover it during a crisis. They already know which contracts they can move on before a vacancy opens.

The Takeaway

Cooperative purchasing is not a shortcut around procurement rules, and it will not solve a workforce shortage on its own. What it removes is the longest delay between a government agency and a signed staffing contract. In government health staffing, where an open position carries real risk every week, that is worth sorting out before the next vacancy rather than during it.

Recent Highlights

---