KOiFish

Chiming in with my takes: As a matter of principle and default orientation, I think equality of opportunities is always good, and equality of outcome is always bad. Yes, I firmly do believe that equality of outcome is AWLAYS bad. In that sense, I suppose I am in agreement with this administration's initiative in doing away with DEI. @C Culham mentioned cases of success stories from his own experience as well. I do agree that success stories exist and I am happy for those companies that were awarded government contracts and were able to grow and expand their companies. However, I am also thinking about the other side of the coin, the failure stories of other companies that may have had better/more capabilities and competitive pricing, but lost out on contracts because they are not of certain "disadvantaged" categories. I think that is an injustice to those affected companies as well as the government and taxpayers who have to pay for more expensive and/or less capable contracts. How do you stop an 8a company from just winning the contract and subcontracting out their work to the work to another company? Why add a middle man to bloat prices? Kind of answering my own question from #3, 8a programs has been used as a method for government to skip a lot of paperwork and competition process to be able to quickly award contracts. Does the benefit of this administrative convenience outweigh the alternatives? Like @Vern Edwards said, all government programs get scammed one way or another by people exploiting the rules and loopholes. If elimination of waste, fraud, and abuse is impossible, then I think we can all agree that minimizing the probability of waste, fraud, and abuse to the extent possible should be the objective. If so, shouldn't we do away with the system of 8a which makes the waste, fraud, and abuse quicker and easier?

Wifcon Community, With the subject of fraud, waste, and abuse regarding 8(a) set-asides in federal contracting coming into spotlight and escalating towards a Senate hearing, I was curious what the community thinks about this. Do you think the program should be terminated completely or should it be kept but revised/refined? In my mind, I am thinking more in terms of what is more beneficial to the federal government and the taxpayers, but I don't see why perspective should be limited to one view, so please feel free to share from any vantage point. https://www.sba.gov/article/2025/12/05/sba-orders-all-8a-participants-provide-financial-records

@joel hoffman Did not suggest that a single contract would contain every FAR provision and clause and subject to all 1,250 "shalls". Just looking at what was provided by the OP, overall, the burden of "shall" falls 4 times more on Contractor than Government and CO combined. From a perspective of a business with no experience doing business with USG, those numbers are not exactly inviting nor enticing. To me, it looks like a good area to look into whether or not too much is asked of contractors and not enough of USG and whether we can do away some red tapes here. Edit: Re-reading my initial post, I suppose you can read it as a single business trying to deal with all 1,250 shalls. To clarify, I meant it as a collective "business" side as a whole having to navigate through the possible 1,250 shalls in FAR Part 52.

The first block of the bullet points alone regarding "shall" is telling - not that it's a surprise. If I am a business entertaining the idea of doing business with the Government, this would be intimidating to me from the get-go and make me think of the costs of consultants required to make sure what would it look like for my business to be in compliance with 1,250 times of "Contractor shall." Could contribute to missed opportunities for the Government or I suppose one could argue that it serves as a discriminator of less-serious/capable businesses. My instincts point me to the former.

I imagine, as always, there will be folks who use AI to copy and paste without perusing the contents and lose their ability to think and know how to apply the vast information that is available through AI tools. On the other hand, the paradigm of learning and producing work is already shifting. The competitive edge will come from learning how to formulate optimal prompts that extract precise and accurate results from AI and knowing how to curate those information and orchestrate a case that strengthens your work. Much like a maestro, who is not required to know how to play all the instruments in the orchestra, but knows how to command and arrange the instruments together and conduct each sections harmoniously to convey the best interpretation/representation of the score.

The titled emailed came in this morning concluding the "five-bullet" What Did You Do Last Week exercise. To wrap it up, the email asks us to submit for the last time through a provided survey link, "one idea that will improve the Department’s efficiency or root out waste. It can be big or small. It can be focused on a particular program or on larger Department operations." I am curious to see what Wifcon community has to say about ONE idea that will improve efficiency and reduce waste at DoD. Provide a one sentence description of what is wrong and what you recommend doing about it. Please rate this problem on 1 - 7 scale. 1. ~$100k or affects 1 person 7. ~$10bn, or worthy of attention by the Secretary of Defense.

I agree with Vern. To me, there are not enough knowledgeable COs for specialists to shadow and receive quality on-the-job training nor enough knowledgeable people in general who can train the workforce. And often times the qualified/knowledgeable folks simply don't have enough time to spend on training the workforce. It would be great if we can bring onboard a seasoned veteran or someone who reached the mastery-level in contracting (perhaps someone like Vern) to each Program Executive Offices, solely dedicated to on-the-job teaching and developing. And perhaps in this process, we can axe a lot of the ineffective training personnel and offices as well as DAU.

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