Contractors may worry, for example, about the government terminating contracts for convenience during the COVID-19 crisis. Non-defense contract actions do not indicate a significant uptick in terminations, however, with less than $21 million deobligated across 2,172 identified contracts in March 2020 compared to $54 million the month before.
… Commercial items procedures can speed up the contract process, bypassing over 100 statutes and regulations. [Link] For COVID-19 obligations excluding research and development, 72 percent reported using commercial item procedures, compared to 45 percent for all March 2020 contracts. However, to use these procedures the commercial item buy must meet the definition in FAR 2.101. [Link] Emergency use of FAR 12.102(f) allows the procedures to be used when an item has not been determined as commercial. [Link] More than $17 million in COVID-19 obligations used the emergency authorities.
Simplified acquisition procedures can reduce process timelines even further. Informal quoting and price comparison may occur, performed orally rather than written. Overall, simplified acquisition may reduce processing touch time by as much as 90 percent. [Link]
For the COVID-19 emergency, the domestic micro-purchase threshold increased from $10,000 to $20,000, purchase orders from $250,000 to $750,000, and certain commercial items from $7 million to $13 million. [Link] The Pentagon invoked these flexibilities on March 20. [Link] $62 million in COVID-19 obligations used simplified acquisition procedures out of as much as $300 million eligible.
That was from a COVID-19 report released by the Center for Government Contracting, written by Jerry McGinn and myself. Read the whole thing. As of April 5, there were roughly $2 billion in federal non-defense obligations (DoD has a standard 90-day reporting lag). I presume that number is a fair amount higher now.
On April 8, HHS announced a $489.4 million contract with GM for 30,000 ventilators to be delivered to the Strategic National Stockpile by the end of August 2020. Given the timeline, perhaps that shouldn’t be counted as a Covid-19 contract. However, HHS invoked Defense Production Act authorities to rate the contract, or force GM to prioritize the government’s ventilator order above all commercial work.
Here’s a little more on contract opportunities:
Suppliers are given short turn-around times on contracts responding to COVID-19. Some responses are due the same day as the notification. Out of a sample of 129 new contracts representing $659 million, the average time from solicitation to award was just 6 days. For the 20 contracts reporting multiple offers, the time to award increased by another 11 days.
Leave a Reply