Speeding Up Services Procurements: Strategies and Tools to Award Quickly, Survive Protest, and Execute Efficiently
The government relies on support services contractors to accomplish a myriad of critical government programs—ranging from major defense weapon systems to program management for the Social Security Administration. In fiscal year 2022, the government contracted for $435 billion worth of support services. The government uses solicitations to select from this vibrant, diverse, and competitive marketplace of contractors. The terms of the solicitation are immensely important to the speed of contractor selection, the defensibility of the selection, and the business value of the resulting contract.
Most of the decisions that the government makes in setting up the solicitation fall into three broad categories: (1) what contract type to choose; (2) how best to describe the government’s contractor workforce needs; and (3) how best to evaluate proposals, including decisions on what proposal information to ask offerors to provide. In each of these broad categories, government source selection teams face a number of decisions about how best to balance the thoroughness of their review against the competing goals of increasing their speed to award and reducing any unnecessary work for both offerors and evaluators. This article explores these strategic decisions within Level of Effort (LOE) support services acquisitions to provide best practices and sample solicitation language designed to increase the government’s speed to award, reduce its protest risk, and capture the benefits of competition.
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"Speeding Up Services Procurements: Strategies and Tools to Award Quickly, Survive Protest, and Execute Efficiently," by David L. Bodner and Per Midboe* was published by the American Bar Association's Section of Public Contract Law (Volume 53, Number 1) in Fall 2023.
*Per David Midboe is currently a senior counsel at Crowell & Moring LLP.