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The Freedom of Information Act might be best known as a way for journalists and public interest groups to get information about the operations of government. But it can also be a tool for companies to get confidential information about their competitors. Safeguarding that information has gotten more complicated in the last few years. Because the state of the law around the FOIA exemption that applies to things like trade secrets, it's all in flux.
The General Services Administration expects to release the draft RFP in early 2023 with the final one coming by March 2023.
In today's Federal Newscast, the Defense Department wasted an estimated $5 million in a single year by buying items it already had in its inventory.
When the army awarded a major contract for communication support services in U.S. Central Command without explaining itself, the Court of Federal Claims ordered the army to go back and fix problems with the 2019 award decision.
The Air Force is exploring multiple options to ensure the service gets the products it wants and helps industry where it is struggling along the way. The war in Ukraine, supply chain shortages, COVID and inflation are all throwing a wrench in pricing and contracting.
The Defense Department’s newest office is being billed as a new and innovative way to approach technology and data in the military, but the office’s contracting department sees itself as a trailblazer as well.
The Space Force organization is trying to avoid reinventing the wheel by buying technologies already developed by business.
New numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics are adding to concern that inflation is going to be with us for some time. The impacts to individual pocketbooks are pretty obvious. The impacts to federal agencies and their contractors, though, are a bit more complex.
The Defense Department is evaluating its own processes with an eye toward making it easier for small companies to provide innovative solutions.
In addition to providing a one-stop shop for contractors, VA is trying to build a culture of transparency on the IT side, in order to make it easier for vendors to integrate solutions.
Despite a lot of uncertainty in the broader economy, contractors have at least a somewhat optimistic view about the federal market. That’s thanks, in part, to a big influx of federal spending initiatives since the start of the pandemic. But vendors still see big challenges on the horizon, including increased competition and new demands to comply with federal regulatory requirements.
Mike Madsen, the deputy director of Defense Innovation Unit, said his organization in 2021 published 26 solicitations for commercial solutions for which it received 1,100 proposals. The solicitations on average received 43 proposals each.
The Defense Department is still figuring out how to raise the cybersecurity waterline among its vendor community as part of its Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification program. And some new research based on privately collected cyber risk intelligence shows the problem is as urgent as ever.
When the government establishes a mandated source of supply, that means there's no way around it. That's what the Defense Logistics Agency found when it issued a solicitation for body armor parts.