[Programming note: This is my last planned post for the year! It's been a joy to write these posts every week. More importantly, though, thank you so so much for reading them! (You too, mom!) I look forward to taking a few weeks off and then getting back

If you hang around government software procurement spaces long enough, you'll start to hear horror stories about "true-ups." Here's a rough sketch of how they go: 1. The government buys some software and the seller sets a unit price based on how much the

When I was in college, there were two gyro joints across the street from each other. I can't remember the name of one of them, because I never went there. Instead, I went to Parthenon Gyros every time. If memory serves, the gyros were pretty good at Parthenon

A fun thing is that basically every single person who has worked in government contracting over the past 15 years has had a variation of one brilliant idea at some point in their career: Yelp, but for government contractors! What makes the idea so compelling is that the database that

A recurring theme in federal contracting policy is the important role that small businesses are expected to play. Perhaps the biggest role for small businesses is their participation in "set asides." The federal government sets annual small-business goals and, consistent with achieving those goals, agencies will limit competition

For a moment, pretend you're a member of Congress and you're thinking about federal procurement policy and economies of scale.[1] One story you might tell yourself is that the United States government is the largest purchaser in the world and, therefore, the government can wield

I suppose we could talk about the AI Executive Order, the draft AI procurement guidance, the draft FedRAMP guidance memorandum, and proposed cybersecurity FAR clauses and how the federal government appears to be experiencing a fair amount of cognitive dissonance around commercial cloud. That could be a good topic! Maybe

Based on an unscientific survey of headlines from Federal News Radio, when it comes to higher interest rates, folks in the government contracting community are primarily concerned with whether their TSPs balances have gone up. Rising interest rates have had a pretty profound on the US economy, though. Bond returns

We've talked about NAICS arbitrage before, which is fundamentally about taking advantage of differences in size standards for different industries to obtain small-business set asides. NAICS arbitrage exists because of the government's small-business policies. Without set-asides, there's no obvious market-driven reason for a company

Programming note—I will be off next week. Meanwhile, because we're in early October and the Major League postseason has arrived, consider re-reading about Smokey Bear Baseballs? And maybe tell a friend about GovContrActually? Either way, happy fiscal year 2024! What a week, huh? Last time I wrote,