Voyager

These eight are the only imperative "D&F" statements this community located a decade ago, in FAR: 6.202(b)(1) - establishing and maintaining alternative sources; 8.404(h)(3)(ii)(A) - use of T&M; 12.207(b)(1)(ii)(A) - use of T&M; FAR 16.401(d) - use of incentive- and award-fee contacts; 16.601(d)(1) - use of T&M; 17.502-2(c) - Economy Act; 25.202 - Buy American, construction materials; and 25.1001 - waiver of right to examination of records. Any FAC since then could have added one, so keep a look out in FAR. Also, your Agency FAR Supplement may add to this list. From a very good read:

You are welcome, and I would like to pass on the greater thanks to @bob7947 for organizing it all for us. Now, ASI Government made a good, unsponsored video about practicing reading the protest cases here every day. I wonder if that activity would be approvable as a DAWIA CLP?? Check it out! (The good stuff starts at the 1:15 mark)

Not gonna get that here. You missed the best part of this website: go to WIFCON.com, then on the right side go to "Legal", then "Protests", then "By FAR". Since you are working in something you do know - FAR 6.302 - click that under the "Link to Decisions" header. Then on this huge searchable page, press Ctrl+F and type in "congressional" and there you have an applicable protest case that will give you your requested "guidance somewhere". Click the "AshBritt, Inc." link. Once inside this protest case you may say, "but I am not using the Stafford Act" - nevertheless, don't come here and tell me I'm wrong, like this is some kind of social media site. Instead, get curious. Go through the "B-____" file numbers the GAO Examiner cites throughout the AshBritt case to justify his opinion to his peers. Take these file numbers and copy/paste them into GAO.gov's bid protest case search tool. Read each of them until you can answer your questions alone, without any help. Then you won't be reliant on anyone else to do your job! https://www.gao.gov/legal/bid-protests/search

In keeping with my above quoted logical progression through the FAR, I certainly hope any GSA COs conducting cost analyses are applying the cost principles to the GSA MAS contracts (not the task order), because take a look at their standard provision’s fill-in for FAR 52.215-20 Alt IV: it requests data other than certified cost or pricing data. Now, are these data about costs or about prices? Contracts Online View Clauses (gsa.gov) https://www.gsaelibrary.gsa.gov/ElibMain/contractClauses.do?scheduleNumber=MAS&contractNumber=GS-10F-057BA&contractorName=AMENTUM+SERVICES%2C+INC.&duns=QEMLRQA7PLG4&listFor=A&view=clauses

Article about the last lot of F-18 aircraft being procured, to include the technical data package: https://news.usni.org/2024/03/22/navy-makes-last-planned-super-hornet-buy-secures-technical-data-packages?utm_campaign=dfn-ebb&utm_medium=email&utm_source=sailthru&SToverlay=2002c2d9-c344-4bbb-8610-e5794efcfa7d Voyager 1 agrees!!

The statement at FAR 52.215-1(f)(4) is like a moratorium on continual improvement of my contract document. Also of proposals. We are conducting business using years-old, draft document versions. @Sam101, if there were one mentoring advice I would provide you, it would be to practice myth-busting that perception. Maybe just use FAR 52.215-1 Alt I and start the acquisition earlier. Get your boss onboard with starting early in schedule initiation and in team formation, as the average contracts shop uses an award-without-discussions PALT by default. As a CS, my second acquisition ever went into discussions, and I did fine with the help of a good CO. If you don't know one whom has conducted discussions successfully, look for a contracts shop where it has been done and apply there.

GSA FSS contracts are contracts for commercial products and services, and thus may meet the FAR 52.215-20(a)(1)(ii) commercial exception to submitting certified cost or pricing data. So long as data other than certified cost or pricing data is not requested by the contracting officer (i.e., the FAR 52.215-20 Alt IV provision is not filled in at the task order level), the FAR Part 31 cost principles do not apply to the prime task order. The decision hinges on whether the CO conducts cost analysis. Here are the references that lead to this statement, in logical order:

@Sam101 Here is some info for you about key personnel discussions, from the Wifcon forum annals. Need help understanding contract formation? Read this topic about "promises" in proposals: https://www.wifcon.com/arc/forum93.htm and: Want to glean understanding of how industry proposes its key personnel realistically? See:

Bob posted a memo to the WIFCON home page showing the Director, Defense Pricing and Contracting, is seeking programs that already use this model. What’s the difference between this model and a FAR 36.207(a)(2) contract? “…[Fixed-price construction contracts] may be priced on a unit-price basis (when a unit price is paid for a specified quantity of work units).”

Agree. The hesitation at the end of my post was simply to say that now the real work starts.

This one successfully forced the implementation of a Section 809 Panel Recommendation, as follows. https://www.wifcon.com/dodauth24/dod24_827.htm Cool! Now, how to administer the change... 🤔😬

Organizations like NCMA Institutions like the American education system Families that grew up with an absent parent Consumerist, instant-gratification-obsessed peers American culture has sold the world on the notion that professionalism is a matter of "certification." I know it, and I am a Millennial. Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." This does not mean anything other than the imperative to examine oneself. Preferably in comparison to history. Start with the 50's and 60's and go back in time from there. There was once a culture where the best of the best in its education system were the wise. Not the knowledge obtainers who passed all the open-book tests that were graded "on the curve" - NO, the wise. The unwise would compete for a spot to spend all of their time being with the wise. For years. Then, little by little, the unwise would become wiser. Then, manifestly, the newly wise would do wise things. Unless each American makes a point to be precisely countercultural in this way, when I am your age, Vern, I will live in the Age of Unwisdom. Now imagine the anxiety I feel raising kids.

@Retreadfed Each CR LOE contract's pre-award RFP development team should tailor the definition to its own program.

This question seems to come from a T&M/LH perspective. The T&M payments clause paragraph (a) applicable to labor (vice (b) applicable to materials) says we pay the labor hours multiplied by the hourly rates. No reference to allowability is made in (a), and I therefore warn readers this LOE discussion does not apply to T&M/LH contracts. Besides, the T&M/LH payments clause calls for "best efforts", not a "level of effort". And as ji and Don allude to above, they are wholly different from LOE contracts. Allowability, at least of labor rates, is assumed to have been determined pre-award.

The PCO should emphasize "productivity" during the meeting of the minds (e.g., Draft RFP, Industry One-on-Ones), but, if the contract crafts the DPLH definition well enough, the ACO always has its four corners including FAR 52.242-1: During each invoice review, see also: In conjunction with: