| ▲ | ElevenLathe 20 hours ago | |
I don't know about this particular case, but often the tender process itself is the reason that there's no meaningful competition for these contracts. There are only a handful of companies that can realistically compete for certain types of contracts given the complexity of managing the bidding, certification, etc., and so they get most of the contracts even if they are not something they can actually accomplish, then turn around and rent some bodies from another shop that specializes in providing government-approved contract workers to do the actual work. You can imagine how disconnected the actual bids, deliverables agreements, etc. are when there are two entire private bureaucracies between even the government project manager -- themselves usually detached from the Federal workers who have to use whatever this process creates -- and the people doing the work. | ||
| ▲ | WarmWash 18 hours ago | parent [-] | |
Contracts sometimes have minimum bid clauses, where a minimum number of distinct entities need to bid for the contract to go through. We have lost projects before because no one else bid them. Which sounds dumb, but I suppose the idea is to keep some competition. | ||