Vern Edwards

The GAO explains "multi-year contract" in a single paragraph of the Red Book: Emphasis added. As for the phrase, "needs of the current year", a single undertaking is the need of the year in which the need arises, even if it will take several years to complete. Recurring needs for many kinds of supplies and severable services are determined on an annual basis. For example, artillery shells and cartridges. But the need for other things, like studies, arrises on an ad hoc basis. Multi-year contracts are sometimes used for the first kind of need in order to enjoy savings from economies of scale. There is generally no benefit from using multi-year contracting for the second kind of need, because there are no economies of scale to be had.

@Jamaal Valentine I don't know. What I do know is that the OP does not know how to do research or is too lazy to do it. There are numerous published explanations of multi-year contracting and multi-year contracts. There's FAR Subpart 17.1, the GAO Red Book, a page here at Wifcon (https://www.wifcon.com/bona/bonafide8.htm), and many articles at Google Scholar, 312 according to the site. Instead of doing research, the OP came here and asked a quick question without providing enough context, a question that no one should have answered except to refer the OP to some readings and wish them luck. I don't know why the people who responded bothered to waste their time. Multi-year contracting is not rocket science. FAR Subpart 17.1 is quite clear about what is a multi-year contract. In the age of the internet there is no excuse for coming to this website to seek an answer to such a question. With all the calls for innovation, this website should be used to discuss ideas. It appears that ideas are lacking or too difficult. If I had been the OP and had been faced with such an office controversy I would have set out to become my office's expert in the concept and then offered to provide a briefing to the clueless. That's how you grow up to become a chief of a contracting office, a policy-maker, an HCA, or higher.

Thanks, Jamaaal! That was a great thoughtful response, and very helpful. Vern

I did say that, and I still do. That's why you cannot rely on it too heavily. I think learning contracting entails on-the-job observation, hands-on experience, talking to people (which is how you gain essential tacit knowledge, i.e., tricks of the trade), supervisor and peer feedback, coursework, and reading. I'm not convinced that you can get all of that in a purely virtual environment. A lot of know-how gets passed on in off-the-cuff conversation.

@C Culham Thanks, Carl.

@Jamaal Valentine How much of learning contracting is taught in "training programs"? What percentage? Is part of "learning contracting" learning how to deal with the people in the offices that contracting supports? Doesn't it include learning some of what they know and about how they think and interact with contracting? Doesn't it include casual conversations with them and with contractors, and with other contracting personnel? In my experience, very little of what I learned about contracting was from formal training. For instance, I learned about line items, a topic that I consider essential, by arguing with other contracting people around the water cooler. I was taught about equitable adjustments through casual conversations with the head of the contract review office. I learned more at the Officers' Club over beers than I learned in classrooms. How do you do that kind of learning in a virtual environment? Not disputing, just asking.

@formerfed @C Culham @Don Mansfield @joel hoffman Guys, I have to take a hit here for not being clear. The person who asked me was not just talking about learning in virtual classrooms but about learning while working in at home, in a virtual office, instead of in an office with other people actually present. Let me clarify: If you hire a smart young person right out of college, can they learn the job while working at home, at a distance, instead of in an actual office?

What does it mean "to learn"? When can we say that someone has learned contracting? How do we know what and how well they have learned?

I agree. That's what I told my friend.

The question put to me was about learning, not teaching. They are not the same thing. What do you mean by "it worked reasonably well"? You taught reasonably well or they learned reasonably well? I'm asking for clarification about what you said. I'm not disputing the truth of it.

A old friend of mine, a senior and very experienced systems acquisition person with one of the armed services, sent me the following text yesterday: Apparently, some people are promoting that idea because prospective new hires want to work remotely. What do you think? How would you answer?

I am inclined to agree with ji20874𑁋that there is no rule against what the OP wants to do. However, I don't know that to be true. There may be no express rule against it. I doubt that there is. But there might be some combination of rules that effectively prohibit the kind of gap that the OP asked about. My point is philosophical, not practical. This, after all, is a discussion board. We now have so many rules and interpretations of rules that making confident statements about the propriety of a particular course of action is sometimes very difficult, unless you can find a statement that specifically and expressly permits the action. How do we get that point across to the people who make and manage the rules and report on your compliance with them? How do we make them understand that we need a straightforward, efficient, and prompt system with simple rules for buying what the government needs to do its work, and that their Sargasso Sea of rules and case law has made buying much too complicated and time-consuming? And the attempts to innovate in order to cope with and overcome complexity have actually made things more complex. Mandatory multiple-award task order contracting was supposed to simplify buying. It has done anything but. Other transaction authority has prompted a sea of "guidance". The rules and "case law" about the conduct of discussions during competitive contract formation ("source selection") has effectively eliminated talk between prospective buyers and sellers. We old timers are not going to be around much longer to make these points and call for procedural deregulation and improved workforce education and training.

You could ask that question about thousands of Wifcon inquiries. It is the question of our time: Why do you think that might not be not possible? One possible response to that question: The Land of the Free is very likely the most heavily rule-bound (measured by page count) society in the history of the world. Throw in the published administrative and judicial interpretive "case law" decisions of administrative agencies and the courts and I do not doubt that we are. I doubt that any society in history has spent as much time and money as we have writing rules and then litigating them. We started out with one big written rule, the Constitution, and we have never since stopped scribbling. For some, it is hard to imagine that there could be any prospective action that is not governed in some way by at least one rule or by some administrative or judicial interpretation of a rule. Instead of "In God We Trust" the real American motto is: There oughta be a rule! ji20874 may be right that "There is no rule to prohibit it, and there is no rule to require continuous service with no breaks when exercising options." But how can we be certain of that? If he's talking about the FAR itself, Title 48 of the CFR, Chapter 1, Parts 1 - 53, then I agree. But what agency does Minnen work for? There are 4,365 pages in the GPO's seven official pamphlet-volumes of Title 48, which contain the FAR and the agency FAR supplements. How can we know that Minnen's agency does not have such a rule? Or two? Or three? Might there be something in some regulation like the Defense Financial Management Regulation? Or some legal office interpretation of some rule that would require continuous service with no breaks? And would "rule" include the proclamations and decisions of the GAO or some other government watchdog office? Remember FAR 1.602-1(b): What would Jonathan Swift think of us? We are right to encourage people to think outside of the box. But how big is the box we're talking about? Our system is ridiculous. We are delusional.

Fascinating. 🖖

Our world is now cyberworld. As an old person, I think cyber has brought great good and great evil. It may bring extinction. The Krell machine is nearing perfection.

Keep in mind that there are two forms of word cyber. Cyber, by itself, is an adjective, as kin cyber threats and cyber incidents. Cyber- (with the hyphen) is a combinatorial form, from which you get words like cybersecurity. I searched FAR for cyber (adjective). I did not search for combinatorial words. They generally came later. The place to look up the etymology is in the online Oxford English Dictionary, www.oed.com.

The first substantive mention of cyber in the Federal Register (i.e., other than as a product model name) was on June 15, 1996, in Executive Order 13010, "Critical Infrastructure Protection", 61 FR 3734, issued by President Clinton: Emphasis added.

The word cyber did not appear in the old Federal Procurement Regulation System (FPR), Title 41 of the CFR, which was canceled in 1984 after the FAR took effect. The word cyber was not in general use until almost a decade later. As I said above, the word cyber did not appear in the CFR until 1999.

@C Culham Carl, by "FPR" did you mean FIRMR, the Federal Information Resources Management Regulation, 41 CFR Part 20? If so, then for the information of others the FIRMR was established on May 17, 1984 (see 49 Fed. Reg. 20994, May 17, 1984) and "abolished" effective August 8, 1996 (see 61 Fed. Reg. 38450, July 24, 1996). The word cyber did not appear in the last edition of the FIRMR. The word cyber did not appear anywhere in the Code of Federal Regulations in 1996. The word cyber made its first appearance in the CFR in 1999, in Title 12, Banks and Banking. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first recorded use of the word cyber (adjective) was in 1992 in the San Diego Business Journal. It's undoubtedly older than that. In its combinatorial form (cyber-) it dates back to at least 1948 and the word cybernetics.

"Cyber" (a word relating to computers and the internet) is a hot topic in government circles these days. Just out of curiosity I decided to see how often cyber appears in the 50 titles of the Code of Federal Regulations. The word appears in 245 locations in the CFR. Guess what set of regulations contains the most locations. The word cyber appears in 73 locations in Title 48, The FAR System. That's more than in any other title of the CFR. The next most locations are in Title 31, Money and Finance𑁋Treasury. It appears in only 14 locations in Title 32, National Defense. I do not know why this is the case.

😂

Bob posted a July 2 announcement from the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense: "Organizational Name Change to Defense Pricing, Contracting, and Acquisition Policy" "Synergies" my foot. Sounds like Madison Avenue b.s. API will be just another bureaucracy. Is API going to tell Congress to ease up on the legislation and the president to hold off on the executive orders? No. Are they going write better regulations and "guidance"? Well, let's give them a chance. But probably not.

For the sake of the OP: Who was "we"?

See also Health Services Marketing Corporation, B-241183, 1991. Such protests have happened, but appear to be very rare.

See Process Control Technologies v. U.S., 53 Fed. Cl. 71 (2002), concerning the cancellation of an 8(a) sole source set-aside because the price was too high. I think this was really a claim, but the court said it was a protest of the competitive procurement that followed. Excepts: I think the agency ended up buying from Lockheed. Not sure.