Haft of the Spear

What a load of crap. Did no one ask, re. those randomly-selected contracts, if the federal client was satisfied? The fact is that contracting for goods and services for the government now requires a monumental amount of paperwork, and your average GS-15 program manager is hard-pressed to generate all of it, error-free. So…. a “demand” emerged and contractors swarmed forward to fill it. (Does this surprise anyone?)

In the best of all possible worlds I, as (for example) the IT program manager I used to be, would transmit a severely simple procurement request to the contracting office — “I need 24 TACLANE network encryption devices.” The fact that I requested it automatically validates it, as I am a program manager appointed by and reporting to senior managers who have given me a budget allocation to spend as I think best to accomplish the mission of the office. The contracting office, working thru GSA or whoever, determines the best unit price and source of supply, places the order, and sends me an invoice that I hand off to the budget guy in my office, and that’s that.

But no, this is not the best of all possible worlds, so I have to generate all the contracting documents myself (since nobody below SES has secretaries anymore). I actually used to be better than most PMs at this, since I type pretty fast and if you show me an example of the document you need, I can use the tried & true “monkey see/monkey do” approach to generate mostly error-free paperwork. Plus, I found the time to schlep up to the contracting office and get to know the people upon whom I relied, after which they (surprise!) became more helpful to me. But not every fed program manager is me, and I can readily see why outsourcing this onerous process is so appealing. To everyone except Senator Lieberman, however.

So far as I can tell one of the main reasons there are so many contractors performing a variety of functions is a among other things a direct result of the inability of govt managers to fire or discipline poor performers?

If any of the contract procurement contractors referenced in this article are poor performers, they can be termed for convienience with little more than a phone call.

RH: Accepting that a fast and furious post may not have adequately communicated my initial sentiment properly, what exactly is your beef? With PMs or CORs or contractors or oversight?

If one knows from the ammo business (vendor and gov’t) it should not have escaped anyone that Joe Blow who has no record of performance and no one has ever heard of scores a mondo contract. No one protests? No one does a little recon and finds out what the deal is? Satisfied customers? Obviously not since the end user is about as likely to die using the product as he is taking fire from the enemy.

You raise an excellent point about the woe that is visited upon PMs and in the last few years COTRs. Everything is getting pushed farther down the food chain, but I know of no one who likes the fact that they are not 90% COTR, 10% analyst. The irony is that it just drives them to join contractors so they can go back to doing what they wanted to do in the first place.

With more qualified bodies working procurement you build in more time to reduce the chance that shams like aforementioned are minimized and people who enjoy reading the FAR can do so.

MK: It has been my experience, and Ralph may have a different view, that contracting shops are staffed for a circa 1999 pace and volume of contracting work. I’ve never known anyone - fed or contractor - in the business to be anything but competent but the workload is just outrageous. Stuff falls through the cracks.

The workload is outrageous, and the majority of contracting officers I worked with were competent and willing to work with PMs to help them get what they needed. There’s a big difference, of course, between contracting for goods and for services (i.e., people), especially in the “cleared” world. PMs want to hang on to the contractors they value and trust, and that’s getting harder to do beyond the five-year point, with Congress adamant about giving small businesses more opportunity.

No argument there.