On July 14, Senator Warner hosted a conference for Virginia businesses seeking to learn more about applying for government contracts. Procurement executives from the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense provided insight into best practices and roadblocks.

 

As Rosalind Helderman noted in the Washington Post’s Virginia Politics blog, in a rare show of bipartisan participation, Republican former U.S. Representative Tom Davis delivered keynote remarks at the conference.

“In this day and age, it's kind of unusual to see bipartisan participation in, well, just about anything,” Helderman wrote. “It wasn't too long ago that Davis contemplated running against Warner for the seat in 2008.”

Davis and Warner, however, joined forces to try to help secure more opportunities for the 550 Northern Virginia businesses that attended the conference, which was held at George Mason University’s Center for the Arts in Fairfax.

Defense spending accounts for 900,000 Virginia jobs statewide, and the Northern Virginia region receives 15-cents of every dollar the federal government spends each year on goods and services worldwide.

You can watch Senator Warner's opening remarks for the Procurement Conference below. More video of the conference, including full panel discussions, are available on Senator Warner's YouTube channel.