If you ever find yourself in need of a drinking buddy, ask a federal employee if they’ve ever traveled on official duty before.[1]  Federal travel is a surprisingly complex area of policy,[2] with an entire subtitle of the Code of Federal Regulations dedicated to “interpret[ing] statutory

Last week, we talked about how a challenger (KPMG LLP) managed to beat an incumbent (Guidehouse) in a procurement with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's Chief Financial Officer. We observed that KPMG won because its proposal scored higher than Guidehouse across every factor, despite having

Happy 2025, everyone![1] A prevailing belief in federal contracting is that it's tough to unseat an incumbent. As some colleagues put it: An established incumbent brings institutional knowledge, existing federal stakeholder relationships, experienced on-site personnel, and leadership buy-in – all presumably resulting in a lower risk transition to

As everyone in government contracting knows, the end of the fiscal year is a particularly busy time. Because budgets are often “use it or lose it” before September 30, the government works extra hard to make sure that any end-of-year funds are spent[1]. And because end-of-year spending is, by

A few months ago, we talked about how mergers and acquisitions can create risks of Organizational Conflict of Interest ("OCI"). As a refresher: 1. If a company is responsible for both (a) performing work and (b) evaluating that work, the company is considered to have "impaired objectivity&

[Programming note: I plan to be off next week, while I participate in the Wisconsin ritual of going “up north” for a couple of days.] As readers of this newsletter know all too well, things can go wrong in government contracting.  There are different categories of ways things can go

A threshold question in every bid protest is whether the company that files that protest is an “interested party.” If you’re not an interested party, you can’t pursue the protest. The principle behind this requirement is that courts aren’t supposed to be forums for the airing of

A few months ago, I wrote about how a restaurant menu can be a mental model for the Multiple Award Schedules program. The salient points are that: 1. In general, a schedule contract lists all of the items you can order and the price associated with the item; and 2.

A few months ago, we talked about how a draft of the NASA SEWP VI solicitation created some sturm und drang in the govcon community due to its choice of NAICS code 541512. By moving from an employee-based NAICS code (541519) to a revenue-based NAICS code (541512), it created some