Unfortunately tons of US gov contracts a) are lowest bid and b) only have one applicant

B) is easy to fix, apply for it, if you don't you have little recourse.

A) Are you sure? In my country I see a lot that are merit based. Where the evaluation takes into account the total value provided. So for example a SaaS solution that costs 10K per month may be ranked lower than a HW based solution that costs 15K per month but provides permanent licenses and hardware.

In any case, if you can argue the lower bid doesn't or cannot comply with ANY of the requirements, you may be able to impugn their bid.

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buildsjets 19 hours ago | parent [-]

B is absolutely not easy to fix, if the government does not offer the bid for public application, and pre-selects the one bidder that they plan to award the contact to, and only invites that one contractor to submit a bid.

I think that you have a naive view of the level of corruption at play in this country. This is how you end up with an incompetent swimming pool contractor destroying a national monument for profit. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/company-trump-donor-cafaro-refl...

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ryandrake 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Even if they pretend the bid is open, they will write the contract requirements in such specific detail that only a single (unofficially pre-selected) vendor can feasibly bid on it.

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quickthrowman 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They don’t even need to only invite the one contractor, just let that one contractor write the RFP so only they can meet the requirements and let the contract for public bid and you’ll get the same outcome.

	▲	hn_acker 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's the Oklahoma Trump Bible strategy. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41741590