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How will COVID-19 impact long term trends in contracting?

COVID-19 presents unique and enduring challenges to business operations and mission fulfillment.

While many “lessons learned” regarding best practices to confront natural disasters can be gleaned from such situations as Hurricane Katrina and 9/11, the unprecedented scope and impact of this pandemic raise troubling issues for legacy business models.  In terms of “big A” acquisition policy, we believe that the current crisis will fundamentally alter existing programmatic assumptions.  Identifying these trends is an important beginning in terms of what lies ahead.

Reading these “tea leaves” allow us to make impacts of recent events upon the broader framework of government IT acquisition. What can we foresee and predict?

From a macro perspective, we believe that the current unprecedented situation has the potential to fundamentally re-align the basic consensus regarding the much-touted benefits of globalization. In terms of government contractors, and IT specifically, we have been discussing the following trends and consequences.

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/commentary/2020/04/how-will-covid-19-impact-long-term-trends-in-contracting/

The Contracting Education Academy at Georgia Tech has established a webpage where all contract-related developments related to the coronavirus (COVID-19) are summarized.  Find the page at: https://contractingacademy.gatech.edu/coronavirus-information-for-contracting-officers-and-contractors/

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Agencies have spent more than $300 million in response to the COVID-19 outbreak

Federal buyers spent more than $4.8 million on hand sanitizer alone in the last two months.
According to the CDC, a novel coronavirus, formally named coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), is identified as the cause of a worldwide outbreak of respiratory illness.

Federal agencies have spent upward of $300 million over the last two months in response to the rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Between February 1 and March 22, agencies reported spending more than $297.8 million on telework products and services—such as virtual meeting rooms, collaboration tools and virtual private networks—and health products like hand sanitizer and ventilators, according to data maintained in the Federal Procurement Data System.

An analysis by The Pulse of GovCon, a federal contracting market intelligence firm, looked at all federal spending data tagged with the National Interest Action code “COVID-19-2020” and variations, such as “covid-19,” “covid19,” and “coronavirus.” The analysis shows agencies spent $6.5 million on ventilators, nearly $4.8 million on hand sanitizer, $3.7 million on gloves and $3.2 million on disinfectants. The balance was spent on personnel support services and IT products and support for teleworking.

But Pulse analysts stressed that the data is likely incomplete at this time.

“Many contracting offices supporting COVID-19, particularly those relocated to the disaster recovery area, do not have access to their normal contract writing systems and thus have not been able to populate FPDS-NG contemporaneously with the contract awards they have made,” they said in a summary report. “Others have not had time to enter data due to the tempo of operations.”

Analysts also noted these figures do not include Defense Department spending, as that data is kept on a 90-day delay for the sake of national security.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2020/03/agencies-have-spent-more-300m-response-covid-19-outbreak/164097/

The Contracting Education Academy at Georgia Tech has established a webpage where all contract-related developments related to the coronavirus (COVID-19) are summarized.  Find the page at: https://contractingacademy.gatech.edu/coronavirus-information-for-contracting-officers-and-contractors/

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FAR rule implements higher dollar threshold for GAO’s protest jurisdiction over DoD, NASA, Coast Guard task orders

In a new rule announced May 1, the FAR Council implemented prior statutory changes to GAO’s bid protest jurisdiction. 

For task orders issued by the Department of Defense, NASA, or the Coast Guard, the rule provides that GAO will have jurisdiction only over task orders “valued in excess of $25 million.”

For civilian agencies, GAO continues to have jurisdiction over protests of task orders “valued in excess of $10 million.”  The rule also permanently repeals a pre-existing FAR clause that had set a September 30, 2016 expiration date on the ability to protest civilian agency task orders.

The new rule — codified as FAR 16.505(a)(10) — implements Section 835 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017, which directed the FAR Council to establish the new DoD, NASA, and Coast Guard threshold.  (The sunset date for protests of civilian agency task orders had previously been repealed by the GAO Civilian Task and Delivery Order Protest Authority Act of 2016.)  According to the FAR Council, its new rule is designed to “follow[] the statute exactly.”

Keep reading this article at: https://www.insidegovernmentcontracts.com/2018/05/new-far-rule-implements-increased-minimum-dollar-threshold-for-gaos-protest-jurisdiction-over-dod-nasa-and-coast-guard-task-orders/

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2016 saw large uptick in bid protests sustained by GAO

In 2016, the Government Accountability Office came down on the side of companies challenging federal procurement decisions more often than in any year in almost a decade, according to data the office sent to Congress last Thursday afternoon.

gao-governmentaccountabilityoffice-sealIn its role as the government’s independent arbiter over bid protests, GAO sided against federal agencies’ initial awarding of contracts and task orders in nearly 23 percent of the cases it decided. The figure was up sharply from 2015, when GAO’s procurement arbiters sustained just 12 percent of protests. It was also the highest rate of sustained protests since 2007, when the office agreed with protesting vendors in 27 percent of that year’s cases.

The raw number of protests GAO sustained was also up significantly over the past year: It upheld 139 complaints out of a total of 616 cases it decided in 2016, the most sustained cases in any year since 2001, when the office’s annual reports began including tallies of the data. That compares to just 68 sustained cases out of 587 GAO decided in 2015. The number of sustained cases has only reached triple digits in one other year: 106 in 2012.

Keep reading this article at: http://federalnewsradio.com/acquisition/2016/12/2016-saw-large-uptick-bid-protests-sustained-gao/

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Lack of transparency hurting government contracting

Could more transparency in the acquisition process help both government and industry?

gwacsNick Wakeman of Washington Technology addresses this subject in the following recent blog posting:

We all like it when people agree with us so I have to call attention to a recent LinkedIn posting by Jaime Gracia that rifted off of a blog I wrote last month about the lack of transparency in awarding task orders.

Gracia, CEO of Seville Government Consulting, agrees with me about the need for more transparency and raises some additional points worth calling attention to.

“There simply is too much secrecy with the amount of money flowing through all the contract vehicles across government,” Gracia wrote in his LinkedIn post. “I know many small businesses spend countless hours trying to find out information about these activities, with little success unless you have some insider knowledge.”

While I was focused on task orders, Gracia also pulls in the lack of transparency around the pre-solicitation process. He thinks there needs to be more transparency around responses to sources sought notices.

Keep reading this article at: https://washingtontechnology.com/blogs/editors-notebook/2016/08/gracia-linkedin-transparency-blog.aspx

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