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:

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:

The government does not know how to properly administer (or award with administration in mind) anything. Many COs are already familiar with the term "Direct Productive Labor Hour (DPLH)" in their contracts, but most contracts do not define it. This type of cost is unregulated in FAR - the Cost Principle governing costs of idleness only seems to apply to supply purchases. An Advance Agreement could tailor and extend its coverage to support services appropriately. The implications of what you can do with this critical thought are astounding. You can save your agency so much waste simply by writing into your level-of-effort RFPs a definition of "Productive". Do it, I say! And then administer your own award, so no one misinterprets your intent. Thanks for the idea, Vern! Am I tracking with your reasoning here?

@formerfedFAR 8.405-2 "Ordering procedures for services requiring a statement of work", is beautifully permissive in my opinion.

The number of labor-hours to be performed by specified classes of employees over a given period of time.

No. A contract, according to the Government Contracts Reference Book (Third Edition) is, "An agreement...to do or not do something...for a legal consideration." One type of contract is the Federal Supply Schedule (FSS), a commercial, multiple-award IDIQ contract (according to FAR 8.402(a)) for governmentwide use. It excludes no seller and relies on free market principles instead. The multiple-award FSS BPA, on the other hand, is 1) Not a contract, and 2) Excludes potential awardees. At the same time, it alludes to the promise of huge amounts of awards - a $450M ceiling price for each BPA in this case - disingenuously, in hopes for pre-priced volume discounts. The problem is that the government's $450M number will likely not come to fruition, and only serves to draw more attention. When it comes to industry attention, be careful what you ask for. Caveat emptor. You may, or rather must, scrutinize your initial contract estimates. A wise buyer should also consider simply negotiating the client's task order under an FSS, using the free reign allowed by FAR 6.102(d)(3), which makes all CICA-like competitive procedures null on the instant acquisition, and FAR 12.213, which allows the government freedom to propose terms and conditions (including pricing) tailored to the instant acquisition. Stating that you are holding a competition again, for a BPA, when you don't have to, just invites protest that the government is being anticompetitive in its evaluation procedures (paradoxically enough).

Just beware, the Certificate of Current Cost or Pricing Data covers the indirect cost rates you apply in the proposal. And for COs: beware of trusting a proposal with just an extension of current year provisional billing rates into outyears. Ask the question: did you analyze your business base to project these outyears?

I think Joel is just sensing that a lack of government-unique terms and conditions does not mean the government, as an enormous buyer entering a commercial market, cannot leverage its purchasing power to get terms and conditions favorable to its shareholders (taxpayers). That has always been the focus of DOD in the post-FY16 NDAA era. One of the main precepts they train is "Be a Prudent Businessperson", along with "Understand the Competitive Market Conditions" and "Have Reasonable Knowledge of the Marketplace".

Could an intrepid CO write into the contract a conducting-business-on-the-flight requirement for business class to be allowable? I am asking if that would confuse potential bidders to see that in the travel CLIN description on a commercial contract. As a practitioner myself, I feel this potential confusion over what is a standard commercial T&C scares COs out of the commercial market.

Because I and the majority of people that travel view the 3x pricing of business class to be imprudent as a general rule, and Don is speaking in generalities. The “majority” is evident by the fact that a majority of tickets sold are coach. Now, what is really imprudent, though, was something I witnessed the last time I traveled on a 3-hour flight. A man in front of me, not in uniform and who I did not know, opened his laptop and revealed it said “UNCLASSIFIED” at the top on a green header. He started working on a scope document in MS Word. It was logged in and thus gave his full name and office routing symbol in the header of Word. I knew from my experience at that base that he was contracting. They are trained in information security there, and this was a breach. So under the current prudence standard, should he have been granted an exception to go business class to work? Or could he have printed his document as a prudent way to avoid burdening the taxpayers with 3x airfare? Change the law from a prudence standard to a conducting-business-on-the-flight standard, and I would agree with Don. Without that clarity though, we would have a lot of loafers sleeping and drinking on Uncle Sam’s dime.

No thanks! I hope you were kidding.

Carl! She'll never show until we admit that perfection is the enemy of excellence. Keep reading it - I have so many questions, like why is Section M the longest section besides C. We must not prejudge.

Okay, I agree we can get riled up over theory but in the end it may do no good. Instead, I suggest a ceasefire of our academic debate on this thread unless we hear from a current practitioner that can lead us to the example you seek above. I know who I would like to hear from - she is the FBI Contracting Specialist featured by the late Senator McCain as a shining example of a counterpoint to the Army's handgun acquisition that Vern cites above. See her SAM.gov Contract Opportunity RFP-OSCU-DSU1503 here: https://sam.gov/opp/cb29a43649fc2efa89f624b8f461e8f3/view Apparently in this excellent example it was, among other teammates, Jennifer Unger, as that is the name that shows up in SAM.

Once you talk about training you introduce bureaucracy. I am trying to butt that out and emphasize personal initiative! Professional study! The road to where we are now was paved with training materials.

These are insightful quotes that truly get to the heart of the problem at low dollar thresholds (the two recent posts on this thread about bureaucracy are more applicable to high-dollar acquisitions). In my experience we must always take a grassroots approach to change in government. It will never begin at a level higher than a Chief of Contracting Office/ Procurement Director. Start with one acquisition in your office. Give the job to somebody that has been buying the stuff your office buys for half a career. Make sure no personality problems will get in the way (see above). Pay this person for the time it takes to study the Federal Register comments, the Section 809 Panel's report, as well as the Nash & Cibinic Reports on this subject matter. Then follow formerfed's advice: I will add that you should pick a contractor known by your office to cooperate, that will be willing to take the hits from SBA, DOL, or others along with the CO, and that will be willing to laugh off any beginner's mistakes by the CO. If enough COCO/PDs do this, things will change.