Happy Monday! As the Obama administration nears some big decisions on the future of government contracting, it has for the first time proposed new rules on how some contractors should deal with potential conflicts of interest among their employees. The new proposed rules, issued Friday in the Federal Register, are aimed specifically at companies thatRead… Read more »
From The Acquisition Corner As part of the Obama Administration’s call for reform of the federal acquisition process, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) recently issued a second set of memos with guidance on increasing competition for better outcomes. These memos are a continuation of original OMB guidance released in July, which outlined waysRead… Read more »
Relative to upcoming Thanksgiving Holiday – life outside of the proposal box. Family archiving – your book of remembrance on Thanksgiving by Donna L. Quesinberry, National Writing Examiner Your work of art via a Book of Remembrance or Family Archive Thanksgiving has an appeal that is truly second to none as far as holidays go.Read… Read more »
I am working through the final edits of my workbook and instructional CD titled How to Write Persuasive Executive Summaries I am planning to release in the next few weeks. I am very excited because it introduces my six-part formula and goes step-by-step through helping people become real masters at writing hard-hitting executive summaries. Today,Read… Read more »
Happy Tuesday! The Environmental Protection Agency has ordered two agency attorneys to remove a YouTube video they produced that criticizes climate change legislation backed by the Obama administration. Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel, who are married and live in San Francisco, received clearance from EPA to post the video, but were told they could mentionRead… Read more »
The dominant first year theme of the new Administration has been the importance of achieving “transparency” to build citizen trust. The transparency ideal—inarguable in principle—is difficult in execution. To this end, most of the available leadership bandwidth has been consumed by public promotion of a data centric portal strategy as a means to achieve transparency.Read… Read more »
Very few people really understand the complexities of government contracting, so perhaps it’s no surprise that President Obama dodged a very specific question Thursday morning about the Small Business Administration’s 8(a) Business Development Program. As The Eye has reported before, the program is designed to ensure that minority-owned small businesses — especially Native American-owned shopsRead… Read more »
From The Acquisition Corner Recent reporting by Federal Computer Week (FCW) highlights an issue that is not being addressed by acquisition reform initiatives; reforming the contract protest process. Writing in the Editor’s Notebook blog at Washington Technology, Nick Wakeman discusses the protest by Unisys and General Dynamics of TSA’s contract award to Computer Sciences CorpRead… Read more »
In August, the Commission on Wartime Contracting gave the Defense Contract Management Agency and the Defense Contract Audit Agency sixty days to try to “harmonize their own approaches” to contract management in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since then a “divergence in contractor-employee counts” has come to light, along with some confusion about who is overseeing theRead… Read more »
I am subscribed to the Monday Morning Memos by Alan Weiss – he is considered “the consultants’ consultant.” I like him because he is incredibly insightful, and also has quite a zest for life. His point in today’s Monday memo resonated with me so much that I wanted to share it with you. It isRead… Read more »