What the FAR Overhaul Means for Small Business Contractors | The Upstream Window with David Mullis

Okay.

Okay.

Now, it's particularly interesting to me that's the approach, and I totally get it.

You don't want to just litter the far with formal examples, and especially with forms and templates and things like that, because things change, best practices evolve, you learn lessons, and it's hard to make those updates as things become, if they're statutory, if you've got to go through this long, arduous process to get some of these things updated.

So I can see the benefit of having some of that stuff in the companion guide, but where do you think the downside of that's going to be?

I think that on a base level, when we're looking at just, if you're kind of thinking out about how are contracting officers going to be responding to these new FAR terms, they still have their own liability to be concerned about with poor contracts.

And so there is going to be a natural leaning towards reliable, big business contracts.

dependable, have been used before.

And there's also a lot of emphasis on commercial off-the-shelf purchasing, COTS purchasing.

That is one of the biggest aspects of the Farber Hall is this pivot from having more individualized contracts and moving those over into just generally These are commercial things.

If the normal business would go to Staples to get the folders, you should be going to Staples as well.

But I think where that's going to be when it really hits the road is it's going to be a rub over how comfortable your contracting officers feel to execute those more flexible contracts that might be more novel or innovative or have different vehicles than they had been trained on.

And I think there's a lot of training to do internally for agencies to ensure that the intention of this flexible, lenient FAR is actually achieved and not just scares off contracting officers from pursuing small contractors.

And I think I've seen some kind of examples of that, like just here recently in some of the decisions that have been made.

And it's like the flexibility, the decision-making authority, the perspective and interpretation and all of those great and supposed to be empowering words have been all afforded to contracting officers.

But when they're in a position where they feel like they may be making the wrong choice or they may be making something that is a choice that wouldn't be As clear to them on the execution level or the execution side of things that they tend to default to those things that are the safe choice or the usual players that no one got fired for buying IBM, right? So making sure that they're trying to see why in that regard, I think, is something that I've seen a bit of and I wouldn't be surprised if we start to see more of, which I think is definitely an unfortunate sort of downside of that.

which we need to be empowering and creating more opportunities for something that the government is not known for, which is speed and the speed of acquisition, which we'll get to in a second.

But I think that we need to be giving more opportunities for them to exercise their abilities and their capabilities and their creativity when it comes to doing some of these sort of more interesting and somewhat complex contracting actions that I'm just not sure that they feel empowered to or feel like they have the examples of how to do right now with what they've got.

Yeah, and I think particularly as you look at how cybersecurity requirements are going to be playing a larger role just in federal government overall, MMC, but you also see within these FAR proposals, the inclusion of the NICE framework, N-I-C-E framework.

So that's a whole new cybersecurity requirements that will be on every contractor on the civilian side.

And then you have the DOD has its own defense side of contracting requirements with CMMC.

And it's going to create this rub of how the contracting officers ensure that commercial off-the-shelf purchases or other more flexible or nimble responses to technological issues still have the cybersecurity that the government desperately needs in every single agency.

And GAO and other agencies have noted that it's not exactly their strength right now.

Yeah.

Yeah.