Contracting: Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

One of the significant complications of any meaningful bureaucratic reform is the need to reconcile competing desires and demands. For example, Elizabeth Newell reported on Friday that there's concern over whether the competitions that lead to federal contracts are actually meaningful, useful processes that drive costs down and the quality of services up:

"It's the quality of competition we need to look at in combination with the quantity of competition," Sharma said. "For example, if we determine we're increasing full-and-open competition, are we attracting the best suppliers and the best capabilities?"

While the Obama administration and other stakeholders agree that competition is an important element of a healthy acquisition system, there isn't consensus on whether the government is making progress. "There is no consistent definition for competition. To be able to say whether competition is increasing or decreasing, when there's no consensus definition, is hard," Sharma said.

That same day, Megan Scully reported for CongressDaily that some in the Army want more frequent competitions for smaller batches of products. Given that the request for more frequent, smaller contracts is coming from within the military, and that challenges to the nature of competition in the procurement process are coming from an outside group, it's a decent bet that the Army proposal has a better chance of being adopted. But if the military moves towards more frequent competitions without making sure they're better, they could end up magnifying the problems with individual contracts. Perhaps it's a six of one, half-dozen of the other, since getting a large competition wrong and getting many small competitions wrong could have essentially the same effect in terms of quality of the product. But just holding a competition is a cost for the people who have to put them on and sort through the proposals. Magnifying that cost and still ending up with substandard services, or services that might have been improved through a meaningful bidding process, is a waste.