This Week/Past issues/9 issues

Every issue of This Week

One issue every Monday: what changed, what got decided, and what it means for the file. Each stays here as it was published.

• 9 November 20263 items

  • A weakness for a project type your synopsis never asked for is an unstated criterion
  • When the incumbent's schedule contract lapses, most of its protest lapses with it
  • Consolidation survives a protest on the contemporaneous record, not on the declaration you write afterwards

• 2 November 20265 items

  • An option whose price you never evaluated is not an option you can exercise
  • You may shut a defaulted contractor out of the reprocurement while its default appeal is still pending
  • Cost principles decide allowability only if the contract actually incorporates them
  • FAR Companion 3.0 is out, and it is still guidance you cannot cite as authority
  • Discussions in an architect-engineer selection are not FAR part 15 discussions

• 26 October 20265 items

  • Re-sending a leaked pricing slide to every offeror does not put the competition back where it was
  • In two-phase design-build, the phase-one debriefing does not buy the protester ten more days
  • A final decision on something that was never a claim is a nullity — and issuing one anyway can cost the contractor its money
  • Experience substitutes for a degree only in the labor categories where your own table says it does
  • DHS now has a domestic-source rule for gloves and masks with no dollar threshold and a two-year floor on the contract

• 19 October 20264 items

  • A quotation your own mail filter quarantined never arrived — and GAO read the rule out of the overhaul text, not the codified FAR
  • A letter of appreciation your own agency wrote the offeror is not in the record unless the offeror put it in the proposal
  • Too close at hand reaches past performance, not what is written in a technical proposal
  • An allegation that an adviser steered the award does not make a fifth-of-five offeror an interested party

• 12 October 20264 items

  • You cannot find one offeror unacceptable for missing a requirement and then read the awardee's compliance into a marketing text box
  • A minimum list of carriers does not excuse the letter you did not ask for, and an assumption that waives an SLA unless you pay more is an exception, not a pricing note
  • An 8.4 order carries no debriefing, so there is no debriefing exception — the clock runs from your award notice and your explanation does not restart it
  • Approving a key person while administering the incumbent contract is not a finding that they meet the next solicitation's minimums

• 5 October 20263 items

  • CAS now starts at $35 million, the $7.5 million trigger test is gone, and FAR subpart 30.2 has not caught up
  • Receiving proposals after an agency-level protest is the adverse action — not the written dismissal you send weeks later
  • A second GSAR rule in a fortnight pulls FAR procedures into GSA's supplement — this time utility services

• 28 September 20263 items

  • Schedule ordering procedures would leave the FAR and live in GSA’s own supplement
  • Naming an affiliate on the team is not enough to credit it with the affiliate’s experience
  • The size standards proposal covering 338 industries is open for comment until 20 November

• 21 September 20265 items

  • Eight of the twelve FAR overhaul rules are now out, and this batch closes 19 October
  • The Part 15 proposal redraws the line between a clarification and a deficiency
  • Civilian data rights would be replaced with DFARS text, and subpart 9.6 would disappear
  • If nobody answered your notice of intent, nobody can protest the sole source
  • DHS's PPE clause goes in regardless of dollar value, and it sets a two-year floor

• 14 September 20263 items

  • A BPA order can only buy what is on the ordering contractor’s own schedule
  • Corrective action can’t skip the tradeoff by considering one vendor
  • Copying the contracting officer on a GAO protest is not an agency-level protest