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A collection of 15 issues

Smokey Bear Baseballs

Programming note: Hang on. I go on vacation and I come back and the SBA shut down the 8(a) program?!?! I guess I'll talk about that next week because, yeesh, there's a lot to cover there. And I'm still warming back up after vacay. So today we talk baseballs.

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Anyone who's ever dealt with government contracts knows that the most stressful part of a proposal is the submission process. There's a palpable fear that you'll send the wrong version of some important document that had been edited a million times over. Or that you'll accidentally send the proposal to

Buying the last procurement

There's a famous proverb that generals are always preparing to fight the last war. Similarly, one way to think about government contracting is that the government is always preparing to buy the last procurement. Today, we discuss an example of how the government learns — and sometimes overlearns — from its past

Innovating within a Salesforce environment (and also within FedRAMP)

If you sell software to the government, you probably have feelings about the FedRAMP program. I'll give you a second or two to compose yourself. For everyone else, the FedRAMP program provides a form of centralized security approval for cloud services across the federal government. And as with just about

Remember to read Section L

Although government solicitations can be intimidating to read, it's helpful to remember that competing for a government contract is an open-book test. If you want to win a contract, the thing to pay attention to is the solicitation. If a solicitation says that companies will be evaluated based on the

You can't protest if you don't ask

If you think about it, bid protests are kind of amazing. Like, if I personally decided to buy a Toyota, Ford couldn't sue me saying that I made a bad choice. Or, like, if the NFL picks FedEx over UPS to ship the Lombardi trophy[1], UPS can grumble about

You gotta have a plan...

Here are two ways to think about the burdens of federal procurement: 1. The burden in federal procurement is a bug. Federal procurement policymakers should be making it easier for companies to win business with the government. The government creates silly rules and processes that weed out companies that don't

Multitasking your way through the revolving door

A couple weeks ago, a subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing on the Pentagon's "revolving door." Senator Elizabeth Warren, the chair of the committee, produced a report with some good anecdotes and an awesome title—"Pentagon Alchemy: How Defense Officials Pass Through the Revolving Door and

Taking vendors at face value

A thing about working in government is that everyone's always so damn busy. There's always some fire drill (and occasionally an actual fire), data call or time-consuming process, a suddenly urgent item that sat around for months before it needed to get done ASAP, or it's just crunch time due

Consolidation and shared win themes

A topic that comes up every now and again in government-contracting-policy circles is the impact of corporate mergers and acquisitions on "the industrial base". Even the White House talks about how "extreme consolidation poses risks to our nation’s national and economic security". It's a whole thing! Companies buy other