General.Zhukov

Fact 1: Times have indeed changed drastically. FAR 15 isn't the default for contracting these days. 95% of all contract actions are orders (FAR 16.505 and 8.4 and 13/12), DoD included. You can slice the numbers however you like, the work is overwhelmingly not FAR 15. Its not just little procurements either. For the big boys - actions awarding more than $100,000,000 -FAR 15 is in the minority. NASA's multi-billion-dollar deal with SpaceX is a delivery order. The 1102 career pathway starting with Simplified and ending in FAR 15 still survives, but barely, there isn't enough demand. The decades of reform have, in fact, made contracting a lot simpler and easier. Fac4 2: It's the same here as it is in all the professions whose work is primarily written - AI is drastically and permanently reducing the demand for entry and junior level workers. Will ChatGPT work its way up the value-add chain? Maybe, probably. Unlike many other wordy lines of work, the warrant and need for human accountability when it comes to spending dollars puts a hard limit on automation. Combine these two facts. The future will be very different.

Two points on capacity Like all professions, acquisition has a supply of talent, skill, and capacity and a demand for it. Disequilibrium in this market often produces the worst outcomes: the GS-14 churning out 100+ simplified POs a year, or the GS-11 trying to do a FAR Part 15 action. "What's measured is managed." If a contract specialist failed a pre-solicitation review because the solicitation document made no sense—rather than for the usual stuff, like failing to use the mandatory fill-in text in a clause or lacking the third intermediate approval signature on one of four pre-solicitation D&Fs—then writing would improve.

Claude is misleading or wrong here. RFO Part 12.204 Use the Uniform Contract Format, but complete only those sections that are necessary. This is pretty much why I am leery about the LLMs, they make subtle mistakes and judgement calls.

Devil's Advocate - this is a failure which is fine. Between Feb 2022 and Sept 2025, the Army spent $4.5 billion on dramatically and quickly expanding production of 155-mm artillery shells. As a part of this, Army tried something new and innovative and fast, but which failed. Ultimately, the cost this failure was relatively small part of the overall initiative- 11%. If you want new and fast and innovative, as everyone in acquisition says they do, you must accept risk - which necessarily means the occasionally costly failure. This shows a system working to actually be fast and innovative, which means sometimes failing. The easiest way to avoid failure is to avoid taking chances, to be risk averse. Just say no to innovation, speed and risk taking. If the acquisition personnel involved in this failure are punished, don't ask why 1102s are so risk averse, because this is your answer. That said, there is plenty here that could have been done better irrespective of what I just wrote.

If the author were a CS from my agency, I'd assume this was a thoughtful and deliberate act to actively discourage responses. If you do the laziest thing - simply copy and paste into sam.gov - the text formatting carries over. So your sam.gov text would have paragraphs, for example. To make it look like this - you'd probably have to go out of your way to paste as plain text. That's an extra step for a much worse result. Which a CS would do, if their solicitation were posted elsewhere with pre-vetted sellers, but for some compliance reason they were forced to post an identical solicitation/notice on sam.gov but didn't actually want to get any open market responses. (this actually couldn't happen in my agency, this is purely speculative) Another plausible explanation is that this is a bot-post where the software developers forgot the step 'format text before posting'.

The solicitation is posted to some other portal which hosts the 'real' solicitation. This is a passive-aggressive compliance box check. The large majority of solicitations are never in sam.gov. GSA's private portal - eBuy - has 1,740 active solicitations on it right now.

This scenario does come up, as @formerfed mentions, in R&D / science / IT. Think of it like this - the government is hiring a team, not a company. I would 1) downgrade the relevancy/importance of PP for both offerors, 2) increase the contract's performance risk, and/or 3) reduce the comparative differences in PP between offerors for source selection purposes. If individuals have a disproportionately large impact on offeror past performance, and you cannot comfortably assume those individuals will remain with any offeror for the duration of the contract, then offeror's past performance is a relatively weaker signal of their ability to perform the contract successfully. The offeror's specific proposed team, the key individuals proposed to do the work, becomes the relatively stronger signal - but it comes with a big risk, those individuals staying on the job post-award. Note that this scenario, a very strong PP indicator is an offeror demonstrating a consistent history of hiring and retaining one star performer after another - think Boston Celtics or Yale.

Agree. That is why I put the 'policy' qualifier in my reply. There is no good policy or functional rationale, but there definitely is a good statutory rationale. I look forward to the creative counterarguments about why it isn't ultra vires because the IDIQ awardees agreed, or BPA Calls are legally distinct from "task or delivery orders" and so exempt from 4106, or whatever.

Inconsistency: The tool (BPA) existed, the need (streamlined repetitive ordering against an existing vehicle) existed across all IDIQ types, but the authority was only codified for a subset of IDIQs - MAS. Indefensible: There is no longer any policy rationale (that I know of) for treating a subset of IDIQs differently.

I think of FAR 16.5 BPAs as correcting an indefensible inconsistency in the FAR, rather than a new solution being created to address an existing problem. That said, the timing is convenient. The current policy environment disincentivizes — and in some cases prohibits — the creation of new IDIQs. As a result, COs are expected to satisfy requirements through existing contract vehicles. Where those vehicles are IDIQs (like GWACs), COs can now establish BPAs directly against them under FAR 16.5. This gives COs a mechanism to achieve the same contracting objectives that were previously met by standalone IDIQs, while remaining compliant with policies that favor the use of existing sources. This is a fairly niche application. I wouldn't expect to find many instances of a requirement that is 1) indefinite enough that is should be an IDIQ/BPA, and 2) there is no suitable MAS, and 3) there is a suitable IDIQ. Non-DoD use cases could be medical research or construction/A&E.

Definitely not. sam/fpds data in production as of today uses data dictionary version 1.5, which has Part 8 and 13 BPA Calls, but nothing for a non FSS IDIQ 2nd iter BPA or that BPA's calls. See screenshot below. When will it happen? Short version: It'll be a while. Long version. Adding Part 16.5 BPAs and Calls is much more work than you'd think, because of FPDS's data architecture. It's way more than just adding a value to a field. 1) Adding these new BPAs/Calls would set off a cascade of downstream changes throughout FPDS, as the' requirement state' is very important (all the validations use requirement state, so each and every validation will need to be updated). Upstream, all the feeder systems/reports (like CARs) also will need to be updated to provide this new data. That's a whole lot of coordination, waiting for feeder systems to update, then integration testing, etc. etc., etc. 3) If FPDS goes with this approach, it'll have three slightly different BPA Calls, which isn't wrong, but is clumsy. The alternative more elegant and efficient implementations of Part 16.5 BPAs are all equally (or more) involved. An incremental roll-out could be faster but has a big downside - ultimately it will have to depend on user-input and users make lots of errors, and necessarily means a retroactive data fix that, itself, is very high effort.

My agency is working on one, it looks cool and will be useful, but still in planning phase. The IDIQ needs to be updated first. The CO doesn't know of any that are active yet, and she's looked. If someone here knows of one here, I'll tell her. They can't, at least not in current version of FPDS, nor most (or all?) contract writing systems. FPDS is bad at multiple-award 8.4 BPAs as it is, so hopefully the update fixes these underlying issues.

Fixed capacity. Teams x Sprints. We don't use sizing pre-award because (speaking for myself) its too difficult to define unless there is a history with the awardee to use as baseline. This is important for CO to understand. On the other hand, the contractor needs to know what - and how much - you want them to do. This specific issue is a good reason to not use LPTA or award without discussions. 2. Sustainment vs development (Devops, OM vs DME, etc.). That is extremely important and should be in the contract scope - who is responsible for what. We use a sort-of devops model and one team does both sustainment and development. We have a release backlog and sprint backlog. A release typically has 3-5 sprints. Stories and epics with points. The biz owner and PM (me) approve both. At these two decision points we decide how much effort goes to sustainment vs. development. Most releases and sprints get a bit of both, but the ratio varies a lot. If sustainment and development (OM vs DME) are performed via two teams or different contracts - determining what is what this becomes much higher stakes and avoid this if you can. No good answer. This comes up all the time. Finally, there are so many guides to this stuff. Use them. Find one you like, follow it, tell the contractors and offerors to follow it, and that will help everyone have a common framework and understanding.

My best guess is that 'mandatory' probably intends is that the two CLINs need to be exercised together. The standard practice would be adding to the line-item descriptions a plain language statement like CLIN 1001 and 1002 constitute a single requirement and must be exercised jointly and concurrently. CLIN 1001 & 1002 can only be exercised during Option Period One dd-mmm-yyyy to dd-mmm-yyyy. But yeah, who knows? Who hasn't read a contract and thought 'what is this gobbledygok'?

Upon consideration, I take the comment back. I think you're right. There are large differences between contracting entities in how they operate, but I think I now agree when it comes to use of options, it's not the acquisition procedures. That said, its routine for contract to have both additional quantity and additional time options, and line items with different overlapping PoPs. Junior CS's get early experience with this typing in the line items of the aforementioned orders. Why wouldn't this be true elsewhere? I don't know. Anecdotally, an 1102 I went to grad school told a story, maybe apocryphal (he was a talker), about how his office once broke their CWS because it had only four digits for line-item numbers. For whatever Air Force program he was working in, they had to add the fifth digit, for line item 10,000.