Self Employed

We track it in excel. We track it in teams. We track it in a useless center wide database that is only flagged for compliance once a year and is never looked at. We track it in biweekly meetings. We track it in KTfileshare. Let me count the ways we waste our time.

In person training is already required depending where you're at. 10 weeks of classes in some cases. In person training can't make up for poor processes (regulatory or artificial/institutional.) and you can only blame the individual rather than the system for so long ,especially when the quality of personnel will only likely decrease as the trend of anti-curiosity continues.

RFO is window dressing. Nothing (meaningful,) is actually changing. FY26 NDAA for people who it impacts is where the rubber meets the road.

Shout out to the folks who are excepted, meaning they are forced to work without pay.;

Are you sure? As in many fields -- the people who are willing to put in the work, the research, the time and effort -- will do so, development program or not. The other problem is how do you develop a workforce that is highly specialized? When very often the people recruited are technologically challenged? How do you pay them enough to not lose their mind while learning abstract concepts with no way to actually implement at their home office? How do you provide meaningful training that works for systems, commercial acquisition, operational contracting? How do you provide the breadth of experience while also not burdening units with employees who are essentially clueless for years? Now how do you do that as the budget and appetite for providing training significantly decreases? When units don't want employees missing for a whole month at a time -- god forbid longer!? Do you provide them online click-thru powerpoint presentations instead? I've four QSI's and am at the end of a GS-13 pay range. Recently we transitioned to Acq Demo, a pay band that caps out at NH-03/GS-13. If I promote I will be in the exact same pay band. There is literally no incentive to promote. I am more technically sound than my bosses boss, who is an NH-04, who has family ties to the base. Their workload is virtually made up. They answer occasional taskers and reactively respond to personnel issues occasionally. Due to the restructuring, opportunities to promote to that level will decrease virtually to nil over time. Outside of personal pride, what incentive is there to be better? To do better? The pay system is a problem. The "promote your best technical leaders to supervisory roles," method is a problem.

We'll see what happens in the Senate. "The deepest cuts in the bill are to the Government Accountability Office, an arm of Congress that would see a $396.5 million reduction from current levels to $415.4 million."

No offense to the usual heads, but, there's nothing I'm going to really get here that I won't from looking myself. There really also isn't some burgeoning work or epiphanies here that will impact any change(s) in the current environment. Whether that's comparing the FoRGED and SPEED Acts, staying on top of the absolute nothing-burgers/idiocy coming out of the "Revolutionary," FAR overhaul, quite frankly there's nothing to talk about until more changes. Most of us are also now handling increased workloads due to D(E)RP 1/2/3.0, or staying off the news for sanity, let alone a forum to talk about work.

It really does seem like that. Two levels above me has privately remarked that he honestly isn't really sure what the point of his position is. ~140K in salary that is in the line of fire of the most recent "if not supervising three consolidate," shenanigans afoot. We'll see where we all land when the dust settles.

Folks, if you think anything anyone is suggesting is going to happen, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell ya.

These are not serious people. "Describe an incredibly complex problem in one sentence."

Didn't you hear? AI in its current form is a magical buzzword that solves all issues so you need less staff. You'll just click the right NAIICS/FSC/PSC and AI will handle all contracts flawlessly while you're in your flying car. Any changes to specifications or interaction with the lowly humans bidding on your efforts will be flawlessly adjudicated by NOPEGPT. NOPEGPT additions will also be added to handle customer interaction/education/changes, with retina-scans so you can record in real time the exact moment they lose faith in actually getting what they want. NOPEGPT will also be programmed to negotiate directly with LM/Boeing bots, and you will now book travel for the bots to meet in person so they can argue with each other on the same network to reduce latency -- instead of protests/claims we'll solve it all with battlebot matches. There won't ever be any issues as we roll out to staff who struggle with excel and everything that can go wrong and currently needs human eyes/ears to resolve will simply be consolidated to two or three curmudgeons made available in-between their hourly cans of Brawndo. Be on the lookout for J&ABot, where you can check in real time as useless revisions/bloat are added now by bots instead of people.

Anyone who has used AI and attempted to incorporate it knows exactly how far away the technology is. Sure, at some point in the distant future there may be room for augmentation, but pretending like A.I. is a panacea or some wonder technology that people simply aren't using because they don't like change or don't want to become a horse is garbage. Every agency has Contracting Officers and Specialists who would love nothing more than to press the envelope because doing so would further their career Yet the best you get are hilarious missives begging people to "just play around in GPT and see how it can help you! PLEASE FIND SOMETHING....ANYTHING...PLEASE!!" Yet, crickets. Even ACQbot churns out garbage. Are we going to be eliminating synopsis requirements because AI generated a list of potential vendors so why bother? The reality is the technology can't even generate veritable requirements documentation (see:create,) let alone evaluate source selection information. The best it can do right now is write five bullets. Maybe it can write CPARS garbage that typically was copy/pasted in the past. The days when the robo-GAO IS auditing SkyNet isn't likely in the next 30 years. We can quote million books or articles about change but when the technology is oversold the discussion is pointless.

Not available again. Laughable that buying guides were on GITHUB at some point/in draft. I have zero confidence in the people making the guidance, let alone rank and file staff who have to try to decipher it. My center has been eight steps behind the news cycle. We've had a crying general, and then a Maj. General tell us an executive order was coming out regarding FAR 2.0 only for it to be crickets since. It's kind of pathetic how many internal taskers/"opportunities," we're recently getting to "use AI in acquisition." The LLM's that we have available are even more pathetic. Teach your people how to price proposals from the vendors they work with. Less "throw something into NIPRGPT/ChatGPT," and claim success when it vomits the most breathtakingly horrible output. There is an even greater problem in leadership than rank and file that fundamentally misunderstands how to simply buy something. Half of my job lately has been generating milestones for acquisitions that will never happen because they needed to be started six months ago to have any hope of being awarded in time. Every time someone peers over it and tries to find some fat only to understand the only time savings to be had is if the requirements are drafted on time, the technical evaluation is performed quickly and miraculously has no RFI's required of the vendor (HAH.) If I have one more ask about whether a simple modification or effort that could be SAP could we use other transactions authority?! because some idiot wants an appraisal bullet I might just accept the DRP.

I don't necessarily think of additional questions as pointless. Not everyone reading this forum has all of the answers. One of WIFCON's greatest uses is for posterity. Not even for necessarily the right/wrong answer, but arguments made for or against a way forward that might become relevant to someone else in a different application entirely. Whether you personally value the added information/detail on questions asked is certainly important to you, but not everyone who visits this website publishes articles on federal acquisition and may very well encounter something similar in their future experience(s) in a niche acquisition field. The questions surrounding the type of funding and the different way(s) offices conduct proposal prep are certainly valid directly related and tangential topics respectively.

FMS country. 11X8242 funds, FMS trust fund. Office of the President. Technically the account is subject to apportionment, but my understanding is that when funds are implemented from the Letter of Offer and Acceptance the FMR considers it a disbursement. Thanks Joel -- Similar thoughts. I regret to inform you that those terms (business and contract clearance,) have been codified in the AF supplement, and even worse -- additional requirements codified by PEO and therein each individual division. No process before the process. That said, provisions you have mentioned do not apply here. I probably touch a dozen different cases. I am technically completely funded by one case. When there are personnel who are not assigned a MPCN they are admin-funded. Typically an office carries a certain amount of admin funded positions, which if goes on frequent enough requires them to be moved to an office with a slot to assign them to. As you can imagine, America's recent arms dealing demonstration in Ukraine is accelerating international demand for materiel. In an FMS office that pre-work is the cost of doing business. On each case USG takes a %/cut for Manpower/Admin of the case. DCMA/DCAA also take their own cut. Pre-Letter of Request work often includes requests for a rough order of magnitude, and 3-4 meetings with the KTR for our program managers to actually understand their requirement. Estimate is blessed by blessing division, and then sent to country for signature for an official Letter of Request. This codifies what the country is actually looking for. Usually they're looking at not just the U.S. but many other sources to fulfill their needs. We might get this far with a country who wants to do business. Until this goes out and then a Letter of Offer and Acceptance is signed, there is no agreement between USG/Country. Even when the LOA is signed, until they send the check in the mail (designated bank,) funds are received and processed via trust fund. As Joel mentioned it's treated as overhead until you get to the phase of a formal proposal, and typically only your large(er) businesses bother with proposal prep costs.