Streamlined solicitations for innovative commercial products and services, known as commercial solutions openings are beginning to take off in the Defense Department. Even the General Services Administration’s CSO service, which is open to all agencies for a fee, so far has been dominated by Defense users.
CSOs aren’t as well known or broadly used as their procurement-innovation cousin, other transaction authority, which gives agencies the ability to strike contracts outside the Federal Acquisition Regulation for research, prototypes and production to obtain technology from nontraditional defense contractors. Eleven agencies including Defense have OT authority.
GSA’s CSO holds the potential to bring civilian agencies, most of which don’t have OT authority, the ability to reach out to and select suppliers unencumbered by the Federal Acquisition Regulation. So far, civilian agencies haven’t been biting, but Pentagon organizations are, even though they have their own CSO provider.
The very first GSA CSO customer was none other than the Defense Innovation Unit, a once-experimental buying organization that invented CSOs. Originally designed to lure emerging companies to work for the Pentagon by easing the pain of federal procurement processes, the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, or DIUx, lost the X last summer, when it was designated a permanent outpost for testing defense buying boundaries.
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The General Services Administration (GSA) is planning to “refresh” all GSA Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) solicitations and issue a mass modification to existing contracts in April. The changes include:
A new vendor is taking over management of the vendor verification system run through the General Services Administration, ending
The General Services Administration, on behalf of the Air Force, has kicked off a multiple-award acquisition that could be worth up to $5.5 billion.
Federal agencies have long been afforded wide discretion in defining solicitation requirements to meet their contracting needs. But are a solicitation’s requirements acceptable even where they’re likely to conflict with local zoning codes? What about where the solicitation documents conflict with one another on whether certain requirements are considered “requirements” at all? And finally, is an LPTA procurement acceptable where such conflicts have undoubtedly led to price uncertainty among the bidders?
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The General Services Administration has released a request for quotation for Phase One of its Center of Excellence discovery services, laying the groundwork for GSA to set up CoEs at new partner agencies.
On December 20, 2018, the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) was amended to clarify the FAR’s prohibition on assessing employees with recruitment fees in connection with federal contracts. The rule provides a final definition of “recruitment fees” and clarifies the FAR’s broad prohibition on federal contractors or subcontractors assessing employees or potential employees with any such fees.
