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Name:
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Talullahhound
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Subject:
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The Latest "Good News"
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Date:
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3/4/2009 6:08:20 PM
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It would be unfortunate to have to force task oriented contracts into firm fixed price. You acurately point out that it will take longer and likely raise the cost on some contracts. However, it may force the government to better define their requirements before putting it on contract and I foresee a lot of pre-contract meetings between government and contractors prior to putting the effort on a formal contract. I have found that this process, although time consuming, tends to have decent results.
This seems to be a cyclic idea about using more firm fixed price contracts -- which I believe is still the government "preferred" method of contracting. No one much likes it because it doesn't afford much flexibilities for efforts like you describe, but works well for purchasing widgets. I can remember clearly previous efforts to use more fixed price contracts.
I'm not sure I agree with you that contractors do everything more efficiently and cheaper than government employees. I've had excellent contractor support and I've had my share of people that I've had to get rid of -- and unfortunately, most of the time they didn't get fired, they just got moved to a different contract to be someone else's headache. The problem is that the government has so many support contractors that it would be next to impossible to get rid of them all and just have government people doing the work. In fact, what would likely happen is that those support contractors would likely just be hired on as government employees. Most of the Defense Support contractors are retired or former military anyway. Both my sister and BIL are support contractors for the Army.
But, there are a lot of horror stories in contracting. Almost every major development and equipment contract let by the Defense Department is fraught with cost overruns, escalating unit prices and way off schedule. Part of this is the government's fault, but a lot of it has to do with poor management in the companies. They count on the fact that the government is not on top of everything they should be, and when the government finally does nail them, then it gets engaged with round and round of "get well plans".
I really don't think contract types in something that the President ought to get involved with because it will lead to a knee jerk reaction (except in the AF where they seem like they pretty much do whatever they feel like, whenever they feel like it). I've seen these efforts before, and the gov't politicos make huge pronouncements and set down a lot of new rules until they find out that they are just unworkable and slowly everything returns to normal.
Of course, you have no way of knowing this, but I had a reputation for being pretty progressive when dealing with contractors. Because ulitmately, at least in Defense, most of the time both contractors and govt are trying to get to the same place for the same reason. I can only think of two instances where I was convinced a contractor was trying to screw the government.
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