As signaled as a possibility in its March 9, 2020 guidance in Memorandum M-20-11, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued Memorandum M-20-17 on March 19 to provide short term administrative, financial management and audit relief from the 2 CFR Part 200 Uniform Guidance requirements to a broader scope of recipients of grants
On March 20, 2020, the Office of Management and Budget (“OMB”) released guidance to agencies heads on managing federal contract performance issues impacted by COVID-19 [Linked here: M-20-18]. The memo and attached Frequently Asked Questions (“FAQs”) focus on the following main issues:
Telework: agencies are encouraged to maximize telework for contractor employees, wherever
Continuing his trend of fulfilling the promises set forth in his Contract with the American Voter, President Trump, on January 30, 2017, issued an Executive Order mandating the elimination of at least two existing regulations for every new regulation issued. In particular, the order explains that “whenever an executive department or agency…publicly proposes for notice and comment or otherwise promulgates a new regulation, it shall identify at least two existing regulations to be repealed.” In this way, the Administration intends to offset “any new incremental costs associated with new regulations….” Notably, however, the definition of regulation does not include: (1) “regulations issued with respect to a military, national security, or foreign affairs function of the United States”; (2) “regulations related to agency organization, management, or personnel;” or (3) “any other category of regulations exempted by the Director.”
Continue Reading Trump Administration Seeks to Reduce Regulatory Burdens
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, with the latest edition hosted by partners David Robbins and Peter Eyre and including updates on the National Defense Authorization Act for
On May 4, 2016, the FAR Council’s draft final rules and the Department of Labor’s draft final guidance implementing the “Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces” Executive Order arrived at the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) for review, setting in motion the final steps prior to the issuance of burdensome new compliance
On September 14, 2012, the Office of Management and Budget released the Administration’s long awaited report on the implementation of the potential sequester currently scheduled to occur on January 2, 2012.
The report satisfies three of the four major requirements of the Sequestration Transparency Act of 2012 (“STA”). First, it provides an estimate of the
On August 1, 2012, Acting OMB Director Jeffrey Zients and Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter testified before the House Armed Services Committee on how OMB and DoD intend to implement sequestration – i.e., the mandatory budget cuts currently scheduled to occur on January 2, 2013, pursuant to the Budget Control Act of 2011.
Director Zients’ testimony was anxiously awaited in the hopes that he would clarify how OMB intends to apply sequestration at the “program, project, or activity” level. Generally speaking, sequestration requires that OMB apply uniform cuts to each nonexempt budget account, and that this same percentage reduction then be evenly applied to each “program, project, or activity” within each such nonexempt account. This clarification of how OMB intends to construe the phrase “program, project, or activity” is necessary to determine the level at which the cuts will occur, and in turn, to predict how particular contracting opportunities would be affected by sequestration.
An example – while admittedly a little simplistic – helps demonstrate this point. Imagine that a nonexempt DoD project subaccount is intended to fund contracts at Site A and Site B in fiscal year 2013, each valued at $1,000,000, thus giving that project subaccount a $2,000,000 balance. According to Secretary Carter’s testimony, DoD expects that sequestration will result in a 10 percent reduction from each nonexempt account, and by extension, from each program, project, or activity within that account. But absent further guidance from OMB, it is not clear how that 10 percent reduction would impact the individual contracts in our theoretical subaccount.
At one end of the spectrum, OMB could require that the reduction flow down to the individual contract level, meaning that the 10 percent ($200,000) reduction from our theoretical subaccount would need to be evenly applied among Sites A and B, leaving each with a budget of $900,000. While this would be an administrative nightmare to implement across the entire universe of DoD contracts, it seems consistent with the general purpose of the threatened sequestration – i.e., to evenly and inflexibly spread the pain of the budget cuts so that both political parties have a vested interest in reaching the budget targets set under the Budget Control Act of 2011 and thereby avoiding sequestration.
At the other end of the spectrum, OMB could direct that the reduction be applied at the program, project, or activity subaccount level, but not at the individual contract level. While our theoretical subaccount would see the same 10 percent reduction from $2,000,000 to $1,800,000 as in the example above, here the agency would have discretion of how to divide that remaining $1,800,000 for the work at Sites A and B. For instance, the agency could fully fund the work at Site A at $1,000,000, and fund the work at site B at only $800,000. Continue Reading OMB and DoD Testify Regarding Sequestration’s Impacts
It should come as no surprise to those involved in the federal procurement marketplace that, under the Obama administration, the Government has sought to strengthen accountability in government contracting, and, to that end, has resorted to a number of tools in the Government’s arsenal for combating fraud, waste, and abuse. The latest such effort is
A memorandum issued by the Office of Management and Budget on Wednesday, September 14, 2011, establishes a new Executive Branch policy that agencies should pay small business government contractors within 15 days of receiving proper invoicing documents. Currently, agencies are required to pay contractors within 30 days of receiving proper documentation under the Prompt Payment