The Hidden Issues with Multiple-Award IDIQs

We were pleased to have a guest expert on this post with the highly knowledgeable Chelsea Roberts from Collaborative Compositions.

Over the last few months, there have been a plethora of massive, multiple award IDIQ contracts hitting the street. However, the fact is that these are mostly billion-dollar lottery tickets that look shiny on paper but are likely to fall way short of DoW goals.

It’s time to call out the mismatch between these mega-solicitations and the actual transformation the warfighter needs.

First, they ignore or contradict the principles in the Transforming the Defense Acquisition System into the Warfighting Acquisition System to Accelerate Fielding of Urgently Needed Capabilities to Our Warriors Memo and Acquisition Transformation Strategy. Key elements these massive IDIQs ignore:

• Prioritizing Non-FAR-based procurement methods and instruments as preferred agreements, to the extent practicable.

• Preferencing commercial products and offerings, with enhanced presumption of commerciality to expand qualifying vendors.

• Focusing on modifying commercial solutions when a pure commercial solution does not fully meet requirements.

• Employing streamlined solicitation approaches including Commercial Solutions Openings (CSOs) across all acquisition tiers.

Secondly, they severely overestimate the acquisition ease that IDIQs bring and their ability to attract truly innovative ideas.

• IDIQs by their nature are rigid, hard to manage, and usually carry too much regulatory burden for small businesses.

• IDIQs rarely reward SB participation…as they often spend scarce resources to get on the base award only to realize afterwards (due to limited transparency from the government upfront) that they aren’t competitive for any specific task orders.

• IDIQs are structurally optimized for government administrative convenience e.g. terms and conditions can be set upfront but not necessarily for driving innovation or meaningful competition at the point of execution.

• IDIQs are prime focused which offers little incentive for genuine collaboration. The prime on a TO holds sole privity with the government and can, and often does, use that as leverage over teaming partners.

Finally, many IDIQs are misused for a purpose other than what they were intended. Experts generally agree that IDIQs work best when:

• Services and products are repeatable.

• Scope is reasonably defined with understood pricing.

• Ordering flexibility is needed but requirement flexibility is not.

An excellent example of appropriate use of an IDIQ is JIATF-401’s marketplace with over 1,600 items allowing for dynamic ordering of different quantities based on evolving threats and operational environment. That is not the case in the below