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This week’s episode features a discussion of several common government contractor questions involving payment delays, cost increases due to tariffs, and inability to obtain certain government approvals. This episode is hosted by Peter Eyre and Skye Mathieson. Crowell & Moring’s “Fastest 5 Minutes” is a biweekly podcast that provides a brief summary of significant government contracts legal and regulatory developments that no government contracts lawyer or executive should be without.

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This week’s episode features a deep-dive on Executive Order 14265, Modernizing Defense Acquisitions and Spurring Innovation in the Defense Industrial Base, which calls for a “comprehensive overhaul” of the DoD acquisition system to deliver state‐of‐the‐art capabilities at speed and scale. This episode is hosted by Yuan Zhou, Jon Baker, and Eric Ransom. Crowell & Moring’s “Fastest 5 Minutes” is a biweekly podcast that provides a brief summary of significant government contracts legal and regulatory developments that no government contracts lawyer or executive should be without.

Click below to listen or access from one of these links:

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On April 16, 2025, the White House issued an Executive Order (“EO”), “Ensuring Commercial, Cost-Effective Solutions in Federal Contracts,” requiring agencies to meet their needs with commercially available products and services to the maximum extent practicable. The EO reiterates and builds upon the requirements set forth in the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act of 1994 (“FASA”), which similarly encourages the use of commercial acquisition procedures. Specifically, the EO institutes a required review procedure for certain open acquisition actions and establishes an oversight procedure to be implemented for all acquisitions hereafter.

Continue Reading Agencies to Curtail Unique, Customized Acquisitions in Favor of Commercial Products and Services
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The following is an installment in Crowell & Moring’s Bid Protest Sustain of the Month Series.  In this series, Crowell’s Government Contracts Practice will keep you up to date with a summary of one of the most notable bid protest sustain decisions each month.  Below, Crowell Consultant Cherie Owen discusses GAO’s decision in Perimeter Sec. Partners, LLC, which involved a protester’s challenge to its elimination for exceeding the solicitation’s page limits.

After a sustain-free February, protesters saw significantly more success in March, with GAO issuing no fewer than six sustain decisions this month.  We discussed one of these sustain decisions—involving an agency’s improper use of noncompetitive procedures to procure fruits and vegetables for the Defense Commissary Agency—here

In Perimeter, the Army Corps of Engineers sought to procure preventative and corrective maintenance services for access control points at 19 Army installations in the northeast region of the United States using the procedures of FAR subpart 8.4.  After the Corps awarded the contract, Perimeter challenged the evaluation of past performance and the agency’s tradeoff decision.  The Corps took voluntary corrective action, stating that it would reevaluate quotations and make a new award decision.  However, upon reevaluation, the Agency concluded for the first time that Perimeter’s quote violated the solicitation’s page limits because its organizational chart and its response times chart exceeded the 15-page limit for offerors’ technical approach narrative volume.

Perimeter protested, noting that the solicitation stated “Resumes, Schedules, Table of Contents, Cover Page/Letter, Cut Sheets, Drawings etc., are not counted in the page count.”  According to Perimeter, its charts fell within the exception for “Drawings, etc.”  In the alternative, Perimeter argued that the solicitation contained a latent ambiguity about whether the charts qualified under the exception for “Drawings, etc.”  In support of this argument, Perimeter noted that the Corps itself had previously (in this procurement and others) interpreted the exception to include charts. 

GAO sustained the protest, agreeing that the page limit exception for “Drawings, etc.” contained an ambiguity with respect to whether charts were included in the exception.  In this regard, GAO found that both the protester’s interpretation (that “Drawings, etc.” included charts) and the Corps’ interpretation (that “Drawings, etc.” did not include charts) were reasonable.  Moreover, GAO found that this ambiguity was latent, noting that were no solicitation terms or provisions that were in irreconcilable conflict.  In sustaining the protest, GAO recommended that the Corps revise the solicitation to clarify the page limits and allow vendors to submit revised quotations.

The Perimeter decision provides a reminder that even the meanings of common words can be interpreted differently in the context of a procurement.  While obvious inconsistencies and ambiguities must be challenged prior to the submission of quotations/proposals, GAO may consider issues regarding latent ambiguities after the award of a contract.

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Most protests involve competitive procurements and the many rules governing how agencies are to conduct such procurements. In certain circumstances, agencies are permitted to bypass some of these rules and limit competition. But, as GAO noted in a recently issued sustain decision, the authority to use noncompetitive procedures does not provide the agency carte blanche.

Continue Reading GAO Finds Authority to Use Noncompetitive Procedures Is Not Carte Blanche
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On March 26, 2025, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that defense contractor MORSECORP Inc. (MORSE) will pay $4.6 million to settle allegations that MORSE violated the False Claims Act (FCA) by failing to comply with cybersecurity requirements and subsequently submitting false or fraudulent claims for payment in its contracts with the Departments of the Army and Air Force. This is the first FCA settlement that is based on a defense contractor’s failure to reevaluate and promptly update its self-assessment score in the Supplier Performance Risk System (SPRS) after a third-party assessment resulted in a lower score.

Continue Reading For Better or MORSE: Another Settlement Under DOJ’s Civil Cyber-Fraud Initiative
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On March 12, 2025, the Government of Canada announced plans to launch the Canadian Program for Cyber Security Certification (CPCSC). CPCSC is a cybersecurity compliance verification program that aims to protect sensitive unclassified government information handled by Canadian government contractors and subcontractors within Canada’s defense sector. Canada will roll out CPCSC to contractors in four phases, with the first phase launching this month.

Continue Reading Canadian CMMC? Canada Proposes Cyber Compliance Regime for Canadian Defense Suppliers
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This week’s episode features a deep dive on the President’s Executive Order, Eliminating Waste and Saving Taxpayer Dollars by Consolidating Procurementwhich directs the consolidation of certain types of “domestic federal procurement” under the General Services Administration in an effort to “eliminate waste and duplication.”  This episode is hosted by Peter Eyre and Yuan Zhou. Crowell & Moring’s “Fastest 5 Minutes” is a biweekly podcast that provides a brief summary of significant government contracts legal and regulatory developments that no government contracts lawyer or executive should be without.

Click below to listen or access from one of these links:

PodBean | SoundCloud | iTunes

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On March 24, 2025, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) unveiled “FedRAMP 20x,” a proposal to make FedRAMP more efficient by automating FedRAMP security assessments and continuous monitoring, simplifying required technical controls, and leaning on industry to provide tooling and solutions to support automation. 

Continue Reading FedRAMP 20x: Proposed Framework Aims To Increase Automation and Efficiency
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On March 20, 2025, the White House issued Executive Order (“EO”), “Eliminating Waste and Saving Taxpayer Dollars by Consolidating Procurement,” to consolidate domestic civilian contracting for “common goods and services” within one agency—the General Services Administration (“GSA”). The EO defines “common goods and services” as those described in the Category Management system first developed as part of a previous effort, dating back to 2014, to coordinate spending across the government.

Continue Reading Trump’s Government Contracts Rebrand: From “Government” Procurement to “Just-GSA” Procurements