General.Zhukov

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.

deleted. Will re-write later.

What I meant to state is that federal contracting differs a lot, and my experience is different from the other responses to this thread. The OP's view wouldn't be controversial with my colleagues. I think the COs around me would immediately agree that option 'periods' are actually optional CLINs, that different CLINs can have different PoPs,. I have never seen a grouping of optional line items with mandatory and optional qualifiers. This may be impossible to do with our department's CWS . I doubt such a structure would pass review for the same reasons stated by OP - 'This 'mandatory option' stuff doesn't make sense. All optional line items are optional. Disapprove." I suspect the difference between me and other folks on this thread is that I am in a civilian agency that operates quite differently than .mil. sam.gov is only involved in maybe 5-20% of our awards. A commercial items determination isn't a process, because it is almost always self-evident. FAR 15 contracts are exceedingly rare - outnumbered by orders (8.4 & 16.5) by 20:1. We make great use of the big IDIQs/GWACs/MAS (Alliant, EIS) - where lots of different sorts of optional line items is normal.

Different experience over here. My agency in HHS has some contracts with line items that have differing periods of performance. Different from each other, sometimes overlapping, and different from the contract's period of performance. This is additional complexity that is seldom warranted, but it's a well understood concept. Some of the larger IDIQs (GWACs/MAS/etc.) allow for very complicated CLIN structure - GSA Alliant 2 and EIS come to mind. EIS has >1500 CLINs of every sort imaginable an EIS 'order' (they don't call it that) can have hundreds of optional CLINs. CS's who have used these for more complex requirements are familiar with having many sorts of optional line items and get that option exercises are CLIN by CLIN.

Less Flexibility: Probably the biggest new RFO tool being de facto prohibited, and the post-RFO environment being more restrictive than the old FAR---well, that was quite the rug pull. In past 12 months, mandates have added on around five brand-new >HCA approvals. The most draconian mandate is yet to be issued (OFPP-designated required use contracts). A very broadly scoped set of required-use contracts would be like the introduction of smallpox into the New World of agency contracts, or effectively resurrecting EO 14240 (All to GSA), or [chose your own comically overdramatic metaphor], so the parties involved have wisely not rushed this one. More: The second tier BPAs are a great tool for a niche use case. (They sure look plainly illegal to me - all contractors awarded such contracts shall be provided a fair opportunity to be considered- but I am not a lawyer) Super useful when you have a multiple-award IDIQ as a potential source, but competing every new requirement is too much competition, and a single order (with lots of options) is too little competition. Off/on ramps are great. The clause clean up isn't exactly a flexibility, but it very welcome and is probably much more useful to contractors than to workforce. Since <5% of contract actions are FAR 15 outside of DoD, I am skipping that part since its mostly irrelevant (I'm joking, sort of). This is what comes to mind. Probably more, right?

RFO :This update [to FAR Part 16] represents a deliberate shift from a restrictive to a permissive framework, empowering contracting officers to use novel and innovative contract structures ..." Seven months later... EO: Use of any non-fixed-price contract...must be justified in writing by the contracting officer to the agency head. Who - well, probably not the RFO team. and also probably not someone familiar with how governments actually work, unlike these two: Jennifer Pahlka, whose work I admire: The response to every failure is a new layer of oversight and approval. James Q Wilson, whom everyone should admire: The response to any scandal or failure is to add another layer of oversight.

Agree with FrankJon generally here from my view down in the trenches. Anecdote: I just had a talk this week with an office the has a LH technical support desk contract that will be soon converted to FP (this conversion pre-dates the EO). Their two initial concerns were that they couldn't estimate accurately enough the workload of the help desk to convert to FP, and that FP just means more expensive in exchange for nothing. I think they would argue that the performance risk is the government's and can't be transferred- customers don't know and don't care about the employer of the help desk rep. They see their cost risk as lower under LH, since their expressed cost risk was having to spend more money on their help desk. FP means either price is too high - they spend more for the same thing - or the price is too low, contractor will cut corners to save money and that will reflect poorly on their office, not the contractor and that will also lead to higher prices later on. So either way they will lose. For what it's worth, I think they are wrong on all accounts, but that's what I heard. Also - "Government in Fiscal Year 2024 identified approximately $120 billion obligated on cost-reimbursement consulting contracts alone. " I looked this up with FPDS, and I don't see how this number is possible. Non-FP contracts for all services - not just cost and not just consulting - is $189 billion. I see no way to slice the data to get to their result from public data using standard definitions.

EO What is the steel man argument here? What is the strongest case for why this EO is a good idea? Am I not understanding something - does this imply "justified in writing" but not approved under threshold? If so, what does this mean?

FPDS has been replaced with: usaspending.gov, which shows the FPDS data with a modern interface. It has keyword search. You can export results as a file. sam.gov has a much more powerful FPDS report builder. I have a GVT account, not familiar with the public version. Here is me searching for the keyword 'spaghetti' on usaspending.gov. This also works with partial contract numbers.

I can answer that question. For civilian agencies, Orders are the vast majority, but as you suggest, this distinction is no longer as important as it once was. What once were C contracts are now orders. We have so many GVT-wide contract vehicles - GSA lists 381 of them. Thousands of internal-use-only IDIQs and BPAs. The need to make 'C' contracts is increasingly rare - FAR 15 is the last resort. Consider 75FCMC23F0133 Current Sources of Income and Employment Verification Services. It provides a critical service that is public-facing, complex and high-stakes. Many millions of Americans applying for federal benefits every year rely on it. If it broke it would make the news. It obligates a bit under $100MM per year. Ceiling is $2B over 5 years, First RFI went out more than year before the RFQ was issued. The largest action its agency awarded that year. Evaluation was long and complicated. It is a FAR 16.505 order. It's not on sam.gov. The SEC has about 40 people in the contracting occupational series whose base pay is more than $200,000. All 20 contracting personnel at the Federal Reserve makes more than $180,000. At least 18 at the FDIC make over $250,000. How are things going in these agencies who clearly aren't bound by normal GS pay scale constraints? These are tiny offices, I grant you, but they would be an interesting study in what happens when 1102 salaries are much higher.

My training is in economics and I'm somewhat familiar with the (less mathematical) literature. Economic papers on this topic emphasize that there are differing markets conditions: low-complexity vs. high-complexity requirements importance of price vs. quality Homogenous or heterogenous sellers. (when everyone proposes the same solution to your problem; there is little to be gained by negotiating) Irregular/unpredictable or frequent/predictable purchasing Many others. Buyer likewise have a set of procurement methods - the most important of which is using either negotiation or competitive bidding. Note that in this literature buyers using both competitive bidding and negotiation - receiving many competitive offers and then conducting negotiations - is usually waved away as a self-evidently poor choice. Clearly economists have not read and absorbed FAR 15. I'm only half-joking here - I mean FAR 15 as its understood and used by practitioners, not by FAR originalists. Given all this, the answer to the original question 'Is it true?' is 'It depends.' When the buyer (GVT) uses the right methods for that market's conditions, then Yes costs decrease and quality increases. When the wrong method is used, then the inverse is true. The government treating all contracts as transactions suggests the government is using competitive bidding when the conditions favor negotiation - that's when the answer is no. P.S. A department is doing a natural experiment on this right now - many requirements whose conditions suggest (to me) they are negotiations, and previously were (more or less) negotiated, are now being treating like transactions. Maybe I'm wrong and it'll work out. P.P.S. 'Competition under Incomplete Contracts and the Design of Procurement Policies', Carril et al, 2024, is a recent article about this topic.

The servicing agency is probably wrong here if they are telling you that your Economy Act order PoP cannot exceed 12 months, even though the 1) funds are multiple-year appropriations and 2) the services are non-severable. Presumably, this both a misapplication and misinterpretation of the bona fide need rule. Usual caveats apply: A definitive answer depends on the exact situation. This is a guess. Generally: For a typical Economy Act order, funding limitations (such as the bona fide need rule) generally are based upon the funds used, and funding rules and rules determination are the responsibility of the requesting activity, not that of the servicing activity. Although the servicing activity does have to ensure the requesting activity isn't attempting to circumvent the law. Also note: My agency routinely does Interagency Agreements under the Economy Act using non-appropriated or no-year funds (so not identical to you) and these IAAs are exempt from the bona fide need rule - they can fund severable services for > 12 months, or fund in current FY severable services which will start in the next FY. These funds have many rules and limitations, but that isn't one of them.

As a practitioner, I view federal acquisition as having risk tiers. The Simplified Acquisition Threshold (SAT) serves as the primary—though not sole—demarcation for low-risk acquisitions. Removing this limitation would allow low-risk procedures to be applied to acquisitions that would traditionally be categorized as medium or higher risk due to their dollar value. Scenarios: High $ and Low Risk. Much is gained (speed, simplicity) without much or any downside. Nothing is wrong with this. High $ and Medium+ Risk. If the risks are known and dealt with appropriately - which means doing more scrutiny and risk mitigation that is required by SAP, aka using an appropriate combination of procedures in 13, 14, 15, 35 or 36 - nothing is wrong, I think. High $ and Medium+ Risk. If the risks aren't known and/or aren't dealt with appropriately - bad. What could go wrong depends on the decisions of COs deciding what to do with an acquisition that is high $ and probably needs more scrutiny than doing only what is required under SAP. Are they going to listen to the little angel on their right shoulder and go with #2, or listen to the devil and go with #3? What are their incentives? Also, there are other and better ways than $ and FAR Parts for appropriately identifying and mitigating risk. Finally, I suspect the impact - or what could go wrong - about unlimited SAPs is very different for DoD vs. everyone else. DoD does perhaps twice as many actions >$9 million than all other agencies combined. So for the DoD upside of removing the limitation is probably more than for anyone else (they would take advantage of it far more), and the potential downside might be less since DoD (presumably) has scale-dependent controls and risk-mitigation procedures that civilian agencies just don't have.

Sure, close it. I wanted to read what you all think, and I have.

Good ideas here. Given a critical shortage, I wonder about how I would distribute the not-enough COs were I the SPE. (Note if the actual HHS SPE reads this: Hi!) Collect them all up to pool resources? Would that help? That is centralization, and what sort of stuff is best suited for this transactional arms-length method in these circumstances? (GSA seems to think the answer is everything. The end users I talk to every day disagree.) The many esoteric and unique things federal agencies do - you cannot centralize that. But the rest of acquisition - the mundane stuff that is the majority of the work - not sure. The classic which is more important: Responsiveness to end-user vs. economies of scale. How does this balance work when you've lost half your workforce? Are there economies of scale in federal acquisition? It's not obvious to me if COs are more like barbers (no economies of scale) or bankers (huge economies of scale). - is there some benefit to gathering up not-enough COs and putting them in one place? With a critical shortage, it's not obvious to me what's the best response. I'd find the many unique things that HHS acquisitions do and make sure that at least 3 people - including at least one under the age of 50 - know how to do it. Inevitably, there will be unique things that nobody remaining knows how to do, and I'd want to find those gaps and plug them. Also, day one I'd shanghai anyone I could into COR duty like an old-time Royal Marine roaming the wharfs of Liverpool.

HHS did, in fact, lose about 40% of its contracting workforce last year. The contracting requirements have not changed. Highlights: HHS lost the most 1102s of any department or independent agency. GS-7/9/11: 65% loss across HHS. The big three spending agencies within HHS (each obligates ~$8 billion per year), Center for Medicare and Medicaid, National Institute of Health, and Center for Disease Control: >50% loss For contrast: DoD: -9% (2,500 FTEs) and all civilian agencies: -20% (3,200) You are in charge, what do you do? P.S. You have also lost half of your certified CORs.

GSA re-used a previous solicitation for a very similar travel agent requirement, from 2021, which has seemingly identical convoluted evaluation factors. No way this 190 page+ solicitation was written in 2020. If that office is anything like every other contracting office, the original document was written many years ago and is passed around the office whenever one of these sorts of requirements comes up. I am sympathetic. The last time the solicitation had (probably) 200+ pages and eight or so factors, was protested, GSA fumbled its corrective action and ultimately ended up paying protestor costs. The final documents that came out of that mess surely include hard-won lessons. Why discard that and start anew? Even if the CO thinks she can probably strip out six of those evaluation factors and slim the solicitation down to 10 pages, her management, which remembers paying the lawyer fees last time, will immediately shoot her down, so why bother? Just change the names & dates, update the clauses, and move on. Edit: This story is why things don't change and why people don't learn. I am sympathetic to my imagined CO, but not in agreement. CW Government Travel, Inc.--Costs | U.S. GAO

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Years ago, I was an Army officer who had some COR duties while deployed. As I was responsible for base security, I was the COR for related contracts (3rd country guards, perimeter maintenance, interpreters, fancy security devices, etc.). Our base security contracts were ... satisfactory. The Contracting Office was AF. I visited their base sometimes. You know who had exceptional base security contract performance - fences maintained, barriers and bunkers trash-free, well-disciplined contract guards, the latest fancy devices scanning and detecting threats? The base home to the COs who ran the base security contracts.