Federal Regulations | The Contracting Education Academy

November 21, 2018 By AMK

Move aside sports betting, let’s wager on FAR rules

Nine states already allow for sports betting and 19 others have some sort of legislative action underway to make it legal, according to ESPN’s Oct. 30 sports betting tracker.

Betting on sport is so popular that the American Gambling Association estimates that all four major sports leagues would earn a collective $4.2 billion from legalized sports betting.

So what does this all have to do with federal government management issues?

Well, thanks for asking.

The Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) recently released its semi-annual regulatory agenda and it got me thinking about the proposed and final Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) rules.

What are the chances of any of these rules getting past the finish line?

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/reporters-notebook-jason-miller/2018/11/move-aside-sports-betting-lets-wager-on-far-rules/

August 29, 2018 By AMK

Go far by getting picky with the FAR

Acquisition regulations don’t come with CliffsNotes, so members of a High Performance Team wrote 21 pages interpreting them and won a Department of Defense level award June 28 for their work.

The HPT members from Hanscom Air Force Base and several other major acquisition bases came together to better navigate what is commonly called Federal Acquisition Regulation 16.5. Their findings generated a 21-page Guiding Principles document, incorporated into Air Force Materiel Command’s Informational Guidance this past August and winning a 2017 Department of Defense Value Engineering Achievement Team Award. The tips laid out in the team’s document can reduce acquisition cycle times, saving money while getting products to warfighters faster.

“Many teams spend valuable time, money and resources using formal FAR 15.3 source selection procedures because there is so much stipulation, training and sample documentation available,” said Crystal Foster, chief of contracting for Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System Recapitalization team, who was one of two Hanscom members on the HPT. “Less experienced acquisition professionals gravitate toward that. They want specific direction and rules, but if they just took a closer look and use ‘broad discretion’ in FAR part 16.5, they would have more power over the process.”

Those with Air Force network access can read the final product here. To produce it, the HPT combed through 57,000 contract actions. By the team’s own estimate, those who use tactics outlined in the guide can save an average of seven weeks per order. If every program that could use these acquisition methods did so, it would streamline the process for 15 cents of every dollar the Air Force spends, for a total of $9 billion.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.afmc.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/1568794/go-far-by-getting-picky-with-the-far/

August 17, 2018 By AMK

Pentagon’s startup outreach office no longer an experiment

Diving into long-term relationships can be scary, but the Defense Department said it’s ready to go to commit to its startup outreach program.

Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx), the office charged with bringing Silicon Valley tech to the Pentagon, will now be known as Defense Innovation Unit (DIU).

The name change reflects military leaders’ “commitment to the importance of its mission” and signifies the permanence of the group within the country’s defense apparatus, according to Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan.

“DIUx has generated meaningful outcomes for the department and is a proven, valuable asset,” Shanahan wrote in a memo to agency leaders. “Though DIU will continue to experiment with new ways of delivering capability to the warfighter, the organization itself is no longer an experiment.”

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2018/08/pentagons-startup-outreach-office-no-longer-experiment/150408/

August 2, 2018 By AMK

States to feds: Enough with the red tape already

Representatives from state governments and the financial and hospital industries testified recently that they spend too much time working to comply with a cavalcade of duplicative, outdated or contradictory federal rules, although they stopped short of rejecting regulation in principle.

At the House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee’s sparsely attended but provocatively titled hearing, “Regulatory Divergence: Failure of the Administrative State,” officials espoused the need for federal agencies to adopt a unified cross-agency framework for developing regulations, rather than the “siloed” fashion in which rules are typically crafted.

“We’re finding that 43 percent of our resources within compliance and cybersecurity are utilized to reach federal compliance,” said James “Bo” Reese, president of the National Association of State Chief Information Officers and the CIO in Oklahoma’s Office of Management and Enterprise Services. “We’re all for federal compliance, but the challenge is we spend so much time, and duplicative time because of multiple audits, the same ones over and over and with differences that we have to go out and map and find the least common denominator across them.”

Keep reading this article at: https://www.govexec.com/management/2018/07/states-to-feds-enough-with-red-tape/149857

January 30, 2018 By AMK

How many procurement regulations were finalized in 2017? The answer may surprise you

Here’s an interesting trivia question for all you acquisition lovers in the government: How many rules did the Federal Acquisition Regulations Council finalize during the first year of the Trump administration?

Give it some thought. Did the FAR Council make any changes from Jan. 20 to Dec. 31, 2017?

The answer is: the FAR Council issued one final rule for the entire year.

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsradio.com/reporters-notebook-jason-miller/2018/01/how-many-procurement-regulations-were-finalized-in-2017-the-answer-may-surprise-you/

Nine states already allow for sports betting and 19 others have some sort of legislative action underway to make it legal, according to ESPN’s Oct. 30 sports betting tracker.

Acquisition regulations don’t come with CliffsNotes, so members of a High Performance Team wrote 21 pages interpreting them and won a Department of Defense level award June 28 for their work.

Diving into long-term relationships can be scary, but the Defense Department said it’s ready to go to commit to its startup outreach program.

Representatives from state governments and the financial and hospital industries testified recently that they spend too much time working to comply with a cavalcade of duplicative, outdated or contradictory federal rules, although they stopped short of rejecting regulation in principle.

Here’s an interesting trivia question for all you acquisition lovers in the government: How many rules did the Federal Acquisition Regulations Council finalize during the first year of the Trump administration?

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