I’m seriously confused these days.

The Alliant Small Business contracts were awarded around the end of the year and there were at least a bazillian of them. (A bazillian is a quantification unique to the pundit community that means “more than six.”) The Large Business contracts were awarded at the end of the first quarter (second quarter if you’re in the Government). There were a gazillian of those. So, where is all the business?

I wrote last year that I saw a lot of pent up demand waiting for the Alliant program to become available. More than a few people agreed and we all thought there would be a rush of solicitations as soon as the contracts were awarded. Didn’t happen. Doesn’t look like it’s going to happen.

And, I think I know why.

In last year’s Defense Authorization bill, Congress made delivery orders subject to protest. Being protest-proof was one of the most attractive things about a delivery order in general and the GSA GWACs in particular.

In the same bill, Congress made it mandatory to compete every delivery order (of a certain size) among all contract holders in Multiple Award Contract (MAC) programs. Of course, NOT having to do that was also a very attractive characteristic of using one of the GWAC programs. No one likes to admit it, but if you carefully selected the “subset” of contract holders to solicit for a given requirement, you could be pretty well assured that your “favorite” would be the successful offer. If every requirement has to be competed among all contract holders, who knows who might win?

Then came the Delex (GAO) decision. When GAO said that FAR’s “Rule of Two” applied to delivery orders and not just contracts, and then added that MAC programs with more than one small business contract holder AUTOMATICALLY met the Rule of Two criteria (I’m interpreting here, but that’s the jist of it), the die was cast. I don’t see any way that a requirement contracted through Alliant could possibly be awarded to anyone OTHER THAN a small business. And, I think Agencies with all that pent up demand see the situation the same way I do.

Let’s face it. If you’re a Government program manager with a critical IT requirement (and aren’t they all?), would you turn it over to GSA knowing that it WOULD be awarded to a small business, it WOULD be competed among all (79?) small business contract holders and it WOULD be subject to protest?

And if you did, how long would it take? How long did Alliant take? Three years?

I think the level of confidence among program managers is so low that no one is going to send anything of any substance to GSA for procurement under Alliant. In fact, unless something has snuck through in the last week, the only solicitation even PLANNED for Alliant is GSA’s own revamp of the Recovery.gov web site.

I think this is a major development in acquisition, especially for the Information Technology space. What do you think?