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."

The head of GAO is replaced/up for appointment in December. They are all still working remote unscathed.

SAT is due to be raised, and is one of the many changes proposed by Sen. Wicker: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/5618/text For those in DOD, and FMS, there is also this: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/3138?s=1&r=1 Mostly for DOD -- Wicker's bill is frankly what several of the EO's AI garbage output ate (some of the sections are nearly word for word some of Trump's EO titles,) so I'd expect the FoRGED Act to be the implementing arm of any regulation that is tweaked via the revolution. The congressional thresholds Warren addresses were one of several tenets of the FMS streamlining EO. Still waiting on any word of DSAMM revision(s). I wish they stuck with FAR 2.0. Federal Acquisition Regulations Two (FART) had a nice ring to it. With both the senate and now the house proposing separate bills referred to their respective armed services committees (Wickers before all the nonsense began, notably,) it is abundantly clear that the administration and ruling party frankly have no idea what they're doing and there is no plan. Only chaos. Between DRP programs leaving offices simply unable to execute their workloads, draconian workplace policies, anticipated benefit cuts, unprecedented and intentional political pressure -- it's hard to take Vern's ribbing of the workforce as having any real meaning at this point. Read the room. We're beyond doing more with less, we are currently doing less with less. Yet it's the same ol' so far -- "We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas." No one has time to train younger folks when the asks are becoming greater and bandwith even less to complete it. I have buyer/CO'd nearly half of my substantial workload out of necessity/trainees leaving the government because who the hell wants a job where your boss' boss is playing mind games and calling you worthless on T.V. every other week? I watched nearly an entire division dissolve in thin air with DRP. All with lasting impacts to requirements and cost impacts to the U.S. taxpayer who no doubt will bear it. None of this is good for the United States, the Department of Defense, Acquisition in the government at large, U.S. citizens, and certainly not Contracting Officers.

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.