Deborah Simms-Brown

Deborah N. Simms-Brown serves as a Contracting Officer for the U.S. Agency for International Development/Afghanistan (USAID/Afghanistan), where she leads the acquisition and management of technical assistance and professional services critical to the agency’s mission of advancing sustainable development and institutional capacity building. She is responsible for planning, soliciting, evaluating, and awarding contracts in alignment with federal procurement regulations and USAID’s strategic priorities, with a focus on governance, education, health systems, and civil society strengthening. Her acquisitions typically involve complex, performance-based contracts for expert-led interventions, requiring rigorous technical evaluation and risk mitigation in a high-operational-uncertainty environment. Ms. Simms-Brown works with a diverse range of contractors, primarily international and domestic professional services firms delivering technical expertise in development programming, monitoring and evaluation, and institutional advisory services. While no single contractor dominates her portfolio, she consistently engages firms with proven experience in post-conflict and fragile-state environments, emphasizing performance accountability, local capacity transfer, and compliance with U.S. government standards. Her contracting approach prioritizes long-term program continuity and adaptive management over transactional vendor relationships. Her procurement activity reflects a strong preference for unrestricted competition, with 100% of awards issued under non-set-aside authorities. She does not currently utilize 8(a), HUBZone, SDVOSB, or other socioeconomic set-asides, aligning instead with USAID/Afghanistan’s operational need for specialized, globally competitive expertise in high-risk contexts where small business capacity may be limited locally. Her primary procurement focus lies in NAICS 541990 (All Other Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services), encompassing a broad spectrum of development consulting, research, training, and technical support services. She also manages contracts under NAICS 221111 (Hydroelectric Power Generation), reflecting USAID’s engagement in critical infrastructure resilience projects. Her domain expertise centers on complex, mission-critical services requiring deep subject-matter knowledge in governance, public sector reform, and cross-sectoral development interventions.