Open Dialogue on Improving How to Do Business with the Federal Government Ideas

Remove the intermediaries so the contractor can talk directly to the buyer or contracting officer when an issue arises.The intermediaries have no value added but do delay manufacturing and delivery schedule. They have no authority and just convey info. (very slowly)

I noticed there are not a lot of different opportunities available for WOSBs across various NAICS codes. I receive alerts from FBO for my NAICS codes. However, I haven't received many that are set aside for WOSBs. There needs to be more opportunities across different NAICS codes. I know there are many NAICS codes that are eligible for WOSB set aside, but I haven't seen many contracts advertised that fall under many of ...more »

Agencies should have more flexibility and discretion in defining and using size standards by NAICS code and ownership category to solve the ‘mid-tier trap’ that limits participation and reduces the value created by the small business program. Some departments have recently recognized the value and challenges of mid-tier businesses, many of which are successful graduates of the small business program. When successful ...more »

Notwithstanding the OFPP Act's intent to create a thoughtful,disciplined, and limited regulatory system, Federal agencies have increasingly ignored the system's requirements and proliferated duplicative, conflicting, unnecessary, and ill-designed local requirements that greatly frustrate the contracting community. Most disturbing is the rampant failure to: 1) follow statutory requirements for publicizing and obtaining ...more »

Contracting officers and specialists spend days each year going through proposal spreadsheets, correcting unintentional errors, and performing price analyses, cost analyses, and cost realism analyses. Technologically, the US is easily at the point where offerors can log into a single, web-based application and key in their data in designated fields. The fields automatically catch adding errors and rounding errors, which ...more »

Currently there is a Commercial Items test programs that allows use of SAP up to $6.5M for commercial items, or NDIs that have been sold to State and Local Governments. Unfortunately some design activities are wary about providing commercial item determinations because they fear it could cause them to lose control of the item to another design activity or lose Quality Assurance capabilities. There is also a military ...more »

For IDIQ orders for services (including construction) the true competition takes place at the task order level. The unit prices established at the "umbrella" contract level are essentially meaningless to knowing what the actual cost of work is, yet CICA requires that we establish binding prices. This is particularly problematic for services, where the quantities of units can vary greatly contractor to contract, and ...more »

In section 866 of the 2011 NDAA, Congress authorized a pilot program for the acquisition of Military Purpose Nondevelopmental Items (MPNDI). This allows products developed entirely at private expense to be purchased using streamlined, commercial-like procedures. This gap-filler was carefully “designed to test whether the streamlined procedures similar to those available for commercial items can serve as an effective ...more »

We have been registered on CCR and now Sam for several years. Part of the registration requires a listing of services/products offered. However we have NEVE$R been alerted of an rfp by a CO using this system to notify qualified suppliers.

The present system requires a marketing effort broader and more intensive than is required to sell to non governmental operations.

The FAR should reflect best practices in the private sector and many state construction (15 or so) programs by requiring prime contractors to list/name primary subcontractors in low-price award procedures (like proposed in HR 1942). Since the 1984 Competition in Contracting Act, federal agencies have run away from construction project low-bid prime contract award procedures because of the claims and disputes that were ...more »

See attached document for details.

Despite a growing body of evidence that fixating on costs actually increases them, acquisition personnel insist on making every transaction cost-based. Sections 2379 and 2306a(d) of Title 10, USC, for instance, provide limited authority to obtain cost and pricing information for major weapons systems and their component parts where certified cost data are not required. This authority is over-applied in practice and ...more »