I think I understand both sides... The GAO has had its opinion for a long time, and then OMB and DOJ have their differing opinion, and in March "the U.S. Court of Federal Claims ruled that the HUBZone statute creates a mandatory preference that takes precedence over other small business programs, codifying an earlier decision by the Government Accountability Office (GAO)" (from Acquisition Solutions)... What is a contracting officer to do?
A contracting officer shouldn't feel a need to research and justify and beg for a FAR deviation for something that is clearly executive branch policy, and yet a contracting officer should act under some authority. Vern asserts the current executive branch policy is sufficient. I agree. I work for the President (albeit indirectly) -- so does every other federal executive branch contracting officer. If the GAO sustains a protest against me when I do a SDVOSB set-aside instead of a HUBZone set-aside, that's fine. Then it will become an agency decision whether to follow the GAO guidance in the protest decision. But for the time being, I don't think GAO is sustaining these protests, in light of the confusion.
And yet I'm also sympathetic to the notion that agency heads and HCAs should issue guidance to the contracting officers in their organizations.
In my agency (Forest Service), there has been no direction from the top. I'm free to do whatever I want with my acquisitions, and I'm expected to act prudently and to be able to defend my actions if questioned. I can responsibly handle that professional discretion.
Any contracting officer who is not able to responsibly exercise that discretion should simply ask his or her supervisor in contracting channels for instructions, and then follow those instructions -- whatever they are. If the supervisor says parity, then parity is the answer. If the supervisor says HUBZone always, then that is the answer. [For me, I'm not going to ask my supervisor because I feel I can responsibly handle the matter myself.]
But certainly we don't want to clog up the pipes with thousands of individual deviation requests, all separately researched and differently justified. And surely we don't want every agency head or HCA to issue separately written class deviations (perhaps with differing conclusions).