red tape | The Contracting Education Academy

July 28, 2020 By cs

The absurdity of government contracting

It is time for a top-to-bottom review of the acquisition process.

I take no joy in writing this article, but it is a desperate plea for improvement.

From 1995-2001, I worked for the Department of the Army as a contract specialist procuring advanced communications and electronics systems, equipment and services.

The first contract I ever negotiated was valued at over $3 million opposite an emerging company from Massachusetts. I had just finished my four-week Contracts 101 training in Virginia, and I was eager to put my newfound knowledge of the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS), and Army Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (AFARS) to work on behalf of the Army and the American taxpayer. Then reality set in. Despite being armed with this new knowledge and skill, I was hamstrung by a procurement system so vast, complex and rigid it would make Kafka blush.

Throughout the course of my next seven years with the Army, we were promised acquisition reform, enhanced efficiencies, paperless transactions and less red tape, particularly in connection with the procurement of commercial items and services.

Since leaving the Army, I have focused my practice primarily on commercial contracts in a variety of industries, ranging from media and entertainment to digital advertising and technology. Increasingly, however, I have been handling more government contracting issues for our clients, including negotiating contracts for prime and subcontractors and handling diligence and regulatory issues in connection with mergers and acquisitions. It never ceases to amaze and disappoint me how different these commercial contracts are to federal contracts. The commercial process is still so much faster and efficient; the contracts are generally much shorter and less complex; and the parties are able to navigate contentious issues through negotiations rather than having to abide by a panoply of opaque and largely wasteful regulations.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.afcea.org/content/absurdity-government-contracting

October 18, 2019 By cs

Executive orders issued to combat ‘bureaucratic abuse’ by ‘rogue agencies’

President Donald Trump signed a pair of executive orders last week that the White House said were meant to curtail what it views as “abuses” of American citizens by federal agencies.

The orders deal with what the administration said is a federal bureaucracy that is “running roughshod” over individuals’ and companies’ legal and constitutional rights: they demand that agencies increase transparency in their regulatory and enforcement processes and reduce what the White House said is an overreliance on informal rulemaking.

Both executive orders address the Administrative Procedure Act. The administration said agencies too often use informal guidance as a work-around to the notice and comment processes the APA demands. So going forward, agencies will have to treat all guidance documents they issue, or have published before, as non-legally-binding.

Until now, the White House said, agencies have sometimes used guidance as a stand-in for formal regulations.

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/agency-oversight/2019/10/trump-administration-issues-orders-to-combat-bureaucratic-abuse-by-rogue-agencies/

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

It is time for a top-to-bottom review of the acquisition process.

President Donald Trump signed a pair of executive orders last week that the White House said were meant to curtail what it views as “abuses” of American citizens by federal agencies.

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.

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