General.Zhukov

Published today - FAR 18 Emergency, 39 IT, 43 Modifications FAR Overhaul - FAR Part Deviation Guidance | Acquisition.GOV

Addendum. I uploaded the pdf to Claude, and asked Claude to 'make this solicitation better' and this is the output: COMBINED SYNOPSIS/SOLICITATION This is a combined synopsis/solicitation for commercial items prepared in accordance with the format in FAR Subpart 12.6, as supplemented with additional information included in this notice. This announcement constitutes the only solicitation; proposals are being requested and a written solicitation will not be issued. SOLICITATION NUMBER: M0026325Q0014 REQUIREMENT: The Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island requires 14,000 physical training shirts: 8,000 short sleeve shirts 3,000 long sleeve shirts 3,000 sweat tops Detailed specifications: Short sleeve shirts: 100% polyester, moisture-wicking blend Long sleeve shirts: 100% polyester, moisture-wicking blend with cuffed sleeves Sweat tops: 50% polyester/50% cotton blend with cuffed sleeves Each item requires specific colors and logo placement as detailed in the attached spreadsheet. NAICS CODE: 315990 (Apparel Accessories and Other Apparel Manufacturing) Size standard: 600 employees SOLICITATION TYPE: 100% Small Business Set-Aside CONTRACT TYPE: Firm Fixed Price PERIOD OF PERFORMANCE: 90 days from award PLACE OF PERFORMANCE: Contractor's location EVALUATION FACTORS: a. Price b. Technical capability (ability to meet specifications) c. Past performance The Government will conduct a comparative evaluation of quotations. Award will be made to the responsible offeror whose quote, conforming to the solicitation, is determined to be the best value to the Government, considering price and other factors. SUBMISSION OF QUOTES: Quotes must be submitted by 11 March 2025, 2:00 PM EST via email to: Primary: Sergeant [removed by me]) Secondary: [removed by me] APPLICABLE FAR CLAUSES: 52.212-1 Instructions to Offerors--Commercial Products and Commercial Services (SEP 2023) 52.212-4 Contract Terms and Conditions--Commercial Products and Commercial Services (NOV 2023) 52.212-5 Contract Terms and Conditions Required to Implement Statutes or Executive Orders--Commercial Products and Commercial Services (JAN 2025) 52.219-6 Notice of Total Small Business Set-Aside (NOV 2020) 52.232-33 Payment by Electronic Funds Transfer--System for Award Management (OCT 2018) ATTACHMENTS: Detailed specifications and quantities spreadsheet Logo designs For questions, contact Sergeant [removed by me]

Agree. I think I can summarize this article as: people > procedure. Acquisitions are like baking cakes. How to do you bake consistently better cakes? Better recipes and better chefs. You need both. The FAR is the cookbook of recipes. The best cookbook won't matter if the chef isn't good at her job. Chefs, the acquisition workforce, professionals in general get better at their job through - among other things - professional development. The acquisition workforce lacks high-quality professional development right now. To actually improve acquisition outcomes, professional development must also improve. This is what the FAR reform initiative is missing, and why it won't succeed. "we need to be honest about what works and what doesn’t," Professional development has been extensively studied, and we do know what works and what doesn't. Works: Experiential and Applied Learning (apprenticeships, rotations, apprenticeships, mentors). Case-Based and Problem-Based Learning. Doesn't Work: Passive (videos, on-demand, click-through), Individual courses (most people, but not all, learn much more interacting in groups), Info Dumps, Micro-Learning Not surprisingly, the Good stuff takes more resources (time, effort and money), while the Bad stuff takes less resources (its relatively quick, easy and cheap). A one-year rotational apprenticeship for new employees - that is expensive. Your GS-12's sex-month detail - expensive. But not everything that works is necessarily expensive. An executive who makes her workforce's development a priority can do a lot without much additional resources. GS-9's taking 30-minutes a week going over their problems with an outside (not a direct report) GS-13/14. After-action reviews (my personal favorite method). A classic example: My first boss made me go through every single clause in 52.212-5 and explain to her why every one of those clauses did or did not apply to the instant contract, over and over again. yes, it took a lot of my time (not particularly valuable as a GS-9), but very little of hers.

In my part of the federal civilian government, our acquisition personnel have been cut by 50% to >90%% (depending on the office and how you measure it). For the foreseeable future, out acquisitions, including our market research, will strive to be legally sufficient. Making use of the FAR overhaul is going to have to wait. Enough about that. To simplify only slightly, everything is commercial. Even this missile is (mostly) commercial. The FAR's emphasis on the commercial vs. non-commercial is obsolete, and I am glad to see it go from FAR 10. Unless, like us, there is no small business specialist anymore.

Much of the word count of FAR 16.505 is due to sections that mirror other parts of the FAR. Take FAR 8.405-6 Limiting sources. Items peculiar to one manufacturer, aka FAR 8.405-6 (b) - 339 words Exceptions to the fair opportunity process, aka FAR 8.405-6 (a), (c) & (d) - 1,246 Words Thats...roughly 50% of the word count. I assume that these things are in FAR 16.505 because (for my example) competition-related rules should be the same regardless of which FAR Part you are using, but 16.505 cannot simply refer to those other parts of the FAR. Items peculiar to one manufacturer is restated in FAR 6.302, 8.405-6, 11.106, 13.106-1, and 16.505. Interested to know if and how FAR 2.0 will address brand name / peculiar items in particular. No statuatory basis for it, so far as I can tell. Seems to me that you have to overhaul all of it or it or none. Ideally it all goes in one place, and one place only, and is substantially descoped. Striking brand name and items peculiar to one manufacturer from the whole FAR is fine. Removing it from 16.505, but keeping it in, say, 8.405-6 - so different authorities have significantly different rules about an important part of competition - that would be worse.

A grad school professor of mine, a former Under Secretary of Defense for ATL, once made the point about how he was skeptical of the advice his lawyers gave him about mitigating litigation risk for acquisitions. He gave us two legal reviews to read and analyze. One was '"the problem with federal acquisitions is that there aren't enough protests, and the solution is more protests (aka, more work for lawyers)." The second article was "the problem with federal acquisitions is that there are too many protests, and the solution is more legal review (aka, more work for lawyers)." Basically, legal has their own incentives, which are not your incentives, so consider their advice accordingly.

Thanks Vern! On this new webpage I see a GSA deviation that serves as a sample of FAR 2.0: - Non-statutory requirements removed from FAR Part 1 include but are not limited to Subparts 1.2 and 1.5. If enacted, this abolishes the CAA and DAR Councils as well as Agency and Public Participation. The authority to revise the FAR relies solely on 41 USC Ch. 13. The Federal Acquisition Regulatory Council can unilaterally make revisions to the FAR without the participation of the agencies or the public. How big a change would this be? What are the implications?

A down-in-the-weeds example of what FAR 2.0 means: FAR 16 has minimal statutory basis, so far as I can tell. Say it is dramatically reduced or goes away entirely. Is that what we are talking about with FAR 2.0? Here are two immediate implications. 1) Given >50% of all 'contracts' in the civilian federal government use FAR 16.505 procedures (I think), the impact could be large if there is no 16.505. In particular, say 'items peculiar to one manufacturer' goes away - so far as I know this isn't statutory, & FAR Part 6 doesn't apply to task orders and delivery orders. But the identical 'brand name only/or equal' would apply under other FAR authorities. Well, that would quite the loophole, wouldn't it? Maybe FAR 2.0 just do away with brand name or equal entirely. Great. That will save a tremendous amount of time and paperwork. 2) Contract Types are hard coded into our contract writing and financial execution systems, so we will continue to use what's in FAR Part 16, version 1.0, for the foreseeable future. We couldn't do something new here even if the FAR allows us to.

Thank you for posting the circular! I appreciate the response, and this is why wifcon is great.

From article "Work is also underway on Part 34..." I am looking forward to this. For such a short Part, it needs a lot of work. Part 34 describes "acquisition policies and procedures for use in acquiring major systems consistent with OMB Circular No. A-109." The elusive OMB Circular A-109. I challenge you to find this document online and provide a link to it. Go head, search for it. Spoiler: It is very hard to find. Nobody has read this circular in decades. Wasn't it superseded by A-11 in, like, the 1990s (A-11 has a 75-page guide titled "PLANNING, BUDGETING, AND ACQUISITION OF CAPITAL ASSETS", which surely is the correct citation)? Why wasn't the FAR updated long ago? Why is EVM required, ever? Does anyone actually do EVM? Maybe they do and find it very useful. I honestly don't know, but doubt it. Why is there a section about competition in FAR 34? Isn't this covered elsewhere, like, for example FAR Part 6? Why does my department tell me I must discuss the non-applicability of pre-award IBR for every contract action over the SAT, most of which are a few orders of magnitude removed from being 'major'? Why especially given my department has de facto outlawed pre-award IBRs?

AI reality check. OMB, today "Accelerating Federal Use of AI through Innovation, Governance, and Public Trust" Chief AI Officers. Within 60 days of the issuance of this memorandum, the head of each agency must retain or designate a Chief AI Officer (CAIO). CAI Os will promote AI innovation, adoption, and governance, in coordination with appropriate agency officials. Agency heads may choose to designate an existing official, such as a Chief Information Officer, Chief Data Officer, Chief Technology Officer, or similar official...For CFO Act agencies, the CAIO must hold a position at the Senior Executive Service, Scientific and Professional, or Senior Leader level, or equivalent. The administration seems to be working at cross purposes here. My agency recently fired its Chief Information Officer, Chief Data Officer, Chief Technology Officer, along with their offices and much more - maybe half of our 30 SESs. My agency has also been told to plan for a 40% reduction in IT contract expenditures, which I understand is typical for other agencies within my department. So AI isn't happening for us.

HHS's 1102 workforce: ~1,400 1102s. I've run the numbers on the type of work they do. In a given year: About 65% (~850) only do Low Complexity. Very rarely to never use FAR 15.2, FAR 15.3, non-commercial, cost-reimbursement, competitive source selection using 'trade-offs' (however defined, under any FAR part) with >2 offers received. This sort of CS often does 40-100+ actions per year. Low complexity accurately describes the large majority of HHS's contracting work. The median obligated amount on FDPS, for all of HHS, is about $42,000. As far as I can recall, HHS as a Department did one IFB in FY23 and zero last year. Less than half (a lot less) of FPDS reports indicate competitive procedures where 2 or more offers were received. 10% (<150) do High Complexity work. Have an acquisition that meets 3/4 of the FAR 7.102 criteria, is CR, using FAR 15.2 etc. These are, presumably, your non-supervisory GS-14s and (if they exist) non-supervisory GS-15s (reminds of the rare and elusive WO5 from my Army days). I think a drastically descoped FAR has completely different implications for and effect on these two types of work and types of workers. Maybe no to minimal change for the first group?

The usual culprit for really long solicitations. 52.204-7 System for Award Management You must be registered in SAM. 52.204-13 System for Award Management Maintenance You must keep your SAM registration current. 52.212-3 Offeror Representations and Certifications—Commercial Products and Commercial Services If you are registered in SAM, which you must be, then all you need to do is verify your SAM registration is current, which it also must be. But...in the event that you aren't registered in SAM, and thus non-compliant with two other provisions in this very same solicitation, here are another 15 pages of completely useless text that we must print in full text. You can just skip it though, because if you need to fill it out, you're ineligible for award. Do I have this right? Also, were I buying 15,000 t-shirts, I would want a t-shirt to evaluate, rather than a NTE 20 pages of documentation about the t-shirts.

I need to take a very deep dive into the intricoes of terminations, especially 12.403 T4C. What are the best authoritative sources? COFC Opinions. What else? Any particular opinions that I should read? Excluding Wifcon, I have that covered. The various LLMs, Claude in particular, are helpful too.

I am following up to my own comment about int'l comparison. A grad school prof of mine who did some work with int'l comparative procurements thought the UK was the best in the Anglo-speaking world at this. So here is a snippet of how they do things. The UK overhauled their procurement laws recently and its orders of magnitude more streamlined than the FAR. Slick guide. The 'Procurement Act' is a slim ~150 pages or so. It has many supplemental guides and notes that are more detailed - stuff that is in the FAR. UK a completely different legal, regulatory and market structure, obviously. Like the way that Defense/Intel vs. Civilian contracting works is totally different, the concept of 'commercial' is there, sort of, but very different, and they don't use anything like the US list of clauses (so I've been told). Nevertheless, it's a meaningful comparison. This excerpt is, to me, self-evidently better than the FAR. 56 Technical specifications (1)This section applies in relation to— (a)a competitive tendering procedure; (b)an award of a public contract in accordance with a framework; (c)a process to become a member of a dynamic market. (2)The procurement documents may not refer to design, a particular licensing model or a description of characteristics in circumstances where they could appropriately refer to performance or functional requirements. (3)The procurement documents may not refer to a United Kingdom standard unless—... (4)If the procurement documents refer to a United Kingdom standard, they must provide that tenders, proposals or applications that the contracting authority considers satisfy an equivalent standard from another state, territory or organization of states or territories will be treated as having satisfied the United Kingdom standard. (5)In considering whether a standard is equivalent to a United Kingdom standard for the purposes of subsection (4), a contracting authority may have regard to the authority’s purpose in referring to the standard. (6)A contracting authority may require certification, or other evidence, for the purpose of satisfying itself that a standard is satisfied or equivalent. (7)Unless the contracting authority considers it necessary in order to make its requirements understood, the procurement documents may not refer to a particular— (a)trademark, trade name, patent, design or type, (b)place of origin, or (c)producer or supplier. (8)If the matters mentioned in subsection (7) are referred to, the procurement documents must also provide that tenders, proposals or applications demonstrating equivalent quality or performance will not be disadvantaged.