Under the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act, the DoD has the discretion to forego a price or cost evaluation in connection with the award of certain multiple-award contracts.
The 2017 NDAA includes some important changes that are sure to impact federal procurements. Section 825 of the NDAA, which allows DoD contracting officers to forego price or cost evaluations in certain circumstances, is one of these changes.
By way of background, 10 U.S.C. § 2305(3)(A) previously required that DoD solicitations for competitive proposals clearly establish the relative importance assigned to evaluation factors and subfactors, and must include cost or price to the government as an evaluation factor that must be considered in the evaluation of proposals. Section 825 of the 2017 NDAA, however, alters this section and provides the DoD with discretion as to whether to consider cost and/or price in some competitions for certain multiple-award IDIQ contracts (although not when the orders themselves are later competed).
As amended, 10 U.S.C. § 2305(a)(3)(C) provides that if an agency issues a “solicitation for multiple task order or delivery order contracts under [the DoD’s statutory authority governing multiple award contracts] for the same or similar services and intends to make a contract award to each qualifying offeror . . . cost or price to the Federal Government need not, at the Government’s discretion, be considered…as an evaluation factor for the contract award.”
Under this new statute, the multiple-award contract must be for “the same or similar services.” Solicitations for multiple-award contracts contemplating the award of orders to secure a wide range of services still require contractors to provide cost and pricing information.
Second, the agency must intend to make a contract award to each qualifying offeror. The new statute provides that an offeror is a “qualifying offeror” under the proposed statute if: 1) it is a responsible source, 2) its proposal conforms to the solicitation requirements, and 3) the contracting officer has no reason to believe that the contractor would offer anything other than a fair and reasonable price.
Third, this new authority is discretionary, not mandatory. Thus, DoD components may still require cost and pricing information, even when they would have the discretion not to do so. Also worth highlighting, this change only applies to DoD, and does not provide the same discretion to civilian contracting officers.
Finally, if the DoD will not consider cost or price, the qualifying offeror is not required to disclose it in response to the solicitation. However, qualifying offerors will still need to provide cost or price at the time of competition on these orders, unless an exception applies.
One final caveat to the proposed statutory change is of particular interest to participants in the SBA’s 8(a) business development program. Specifically, the changes outlined here do not apply to multiple task or delivery order contracts if the solicitation provides for sole source task or delivery order contracts be set-aside for 8(a) Program participants.
By granting DoD discretion to omit consideration of cost and/or price at the initial multiple-award stage, the statute may ease the burden on both the government and contractors alike, because pricing a multiple-award IDIQ contract is often challenging. For instance, at times, the government has resorted to hypothetical sample tasks to obtain some semblance of pricing, but the sample tasks may not accurately reflect much of the work that the government later procures under the IDIQ–and with no real “skin in the game,” offerors can be tempted to underbid the hypothetical task. In other instances, the government has insisted that offerors provide firm ceiling prices (for example, labor rate ceilings), which creates a conundrum for offerors: bid high and risk losing the IDIQ, or bid low and risk being unable to profit on orders? In settings like these, postponing the price/cost evaluation until the order competition may be a wise move.
As the President signed the 2017 NDAA into law on December 23, 2016, it will be interesting to see if DoD exercises any of its price or cost evaluation discretion accorded to it under Section 825. However, chances are that DoD contracting officers will refrain from exercising their new authority until DoD makes changes to the DFARS to provide contracting officers with more guidance on its use.