SmallGovCon Week in Review: January 15-19, 2024

Happy Friday! Brrr, another very cold day here in the Midwest. We are looking for relief next week as the forecast is set for warmer temperatures after this deep freeze. I think I speak for everyone when I say that we are ready! We hope that you are staying warm in your neck of the woods.

This week in federal government contracting saw some important stories, including the one-year anniversary of the SBA takeover of the SDVOSB program and the new defense industrial strategy.

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Government Claim Appeals Nuggets from the ASBCA and CBCA 2023 Annual Reports

Everyone has New Year traditions. Some do resolutions, some take vacations, some simply buy a fun new calendar. Here at SmallGovCon we like reading the different federal contracting annual reports. These annual reports function as almost yearbooks or like a friend’s yearly holiday card that discusses all the highlights of the past year. These annual reports are a great resource for contractors to catch up on what a specific agency or tribunal has been up to, and plan for the year ahead. In this quick review of the CBCA and ASBCA’s annual reports, we will cover some of those takeaways. Who knows, maybe in reading this post, you can find something that gives you your own federal contracting new year’s resolution.

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SmallGovCon Week in Review: January 8-12, 2024

Happy Friday! Boy, were we hit with a major snowstorm this week with very cold temperatures sweeping in from the north! We dug out just in time for a cold blast to arrive today and our Kansas City Chiefs have a playoff game at home this weekend, with the high expected to be a balmy 6 degrees! Brrr. I’ll be watching from my climate-controlled living room. Go Chiefs!

This week in federal government contracting news saw some White House initiatives for better contracting, as well as updates on cybersecurity and AI in the federal space.

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Free Event! SBA & DoD Mentor Protégé Webinar hosted by MST Contract Opportunities Center APEX Accelerator, El Paso: January 23, 2024, 10:00-11:30am MST

Touted as a “game-changer” when it was first introduced in 2016, the U.S. Small Business Administration’s All Small Mentor-Protégé Program isn’t new anymore. Known now as simply the “SBA Mentor-Protégé Program,” it is still extremely useful for large and small contractors alike.

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Please join me and Gregory Weber as we explain the ins and outs of the SBA Mentor-Protégé Program, covering the program’s eligibility requirements, its potential benefits (including the ability to form special mentor-protégé joint ventures), the application process, and common misconceptions and pitfalls. Additionally, we will provide an introduction to the even older DoD Mentor-Protégé Program, which set the stage for the SBA’s program, and compare the two programs.

Register here.

Year in Review: Top SmallGovCon Posts of 2023

Happy New Year to our SmallGovCon readers! While we have already posted some updates from 2024, it’s a good time to reflect on the important posts from 2023.

This post revisits those blog posts from 2023 that were the most popular. Below, we summarize the blogs written in 2023 that were the most popular as well as the perennial favorites from years past that were the most viewed in 2023. It’s a good chance to look back on the important articles from 2023, and those topics of continuing interest to federal contractors.

Here are the top 10 blog posts that were posted in 2023. As usual, our readers were interested in changes to SBA’s rules, including changes to the 8(a) Program and the social disadvantage requirement, as well as our Back to Basics series focusing on issues such as teaming agreements, debriefings, and SAM registration.

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Extraordinary Actions v. Day-to-Day Decisions for Joint Ventures: A Cautionary Tale

Back in 2020, we discussed an SBA Office of Hearings and Appeals (OHA) decision stating that the managing venturer must control every aspect of the joint venture. This position, which we questioned in that article, has changed since that time, and we explored the changes to the regulatory language in question not long thereafter. But this regulatory language was still vague. Since that time, there has been much case law development. The Court of Federal Claims (COFC) held in 2022, “[a] minority owner’s control over “extraordinary” actions, such as actions intended to protect the investment of minority shareholders, will not result in a finding of negative control” and applied this idea to a populated joint venture. Swift & Staley, Inc. v. United States, No. 21-1279, 2022 WL 1231428 (Fed. Cl. Mar. 31, 2022), aff’d, No. 2022-1601, 2022 WL 17576348 (Fed. Cir. Dec. 12, 2022). It now appears, fairly established at this point, that non-managing venturers can have a say in what can best be described as “extraordinary actions.” These are the sorts of decisions that can completely change the trajectory of the joint venture. But contractors must still be very careful in giving the non-managing venturer a say in the joint venture’s decisions. As one firm learned the hard way in a recent COFC case, a joint venture with too many actions controllable by the non-managing venturer may end up ineligible for set-asides. Here, we explore this decision.

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SmallGovCon Week in Review: January 1-5, 2024

Happy new year! We hope you enjoyed the holiday and are looking forward to what 2024 brings. It’s been a pretty mild winter so far, but we expect old man winter will be showing up any day now. Until then, everyone has been taking advantage of getting out and about without any major travel problems. We are all grateful for that.

This week in federal government contracting news saw more insights on the new CMMC regime as well as important trends for 2024.

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