I might just be dense, but I don't fully understand how the IFF was supposed to work. What was its intended effect? Is it just a tax that the contractors have to pay on spending the government's money, to disincentivize them to spend that money?
It was intended to make the GSA self-sustaining in budget terms. Under the old system, the costs of running the GSA came out of the Federal budget. The goal back in the '90s was to reduce expenditures in order to cut down the budget deficit. IFF let them push the cost of running GSA off of the Federal budget, by pushing it onto the budgets of the vendors winning GSA contracts.
