As I wrote earlier on this blog, “Business growth is something that should be celebrated, yet if you’re a small business whose customer is the federal government, your growth can have a noticeable downside.” Namely, being too big to qualify for small business set-asides.
If your business falls into the mid-tier category of being too big to be eligible for set-asides but too small to compete with industry giants, here are the most important changes from the 2017 NDAA (click the links to learn more about each item):
- Gives certain small subcontractors a new tool to request past performance ratings from the government. If the pilot program works as intended, it may ultimately improve those subcontractors’ competitiveness for prime contract bids, for which a documented history of past performance is often critical (learn more).
- Will require the GAO to issue a report about the number and types of contracts the Department of Defense awarded to minority-owned and women-owned businesses during fiscal years 2010 to 2015. The GAO will be required to submit its report within one year of the statute’s enactment (learn more).
- Designed to help ensure that large prime contractors comply with the Small Business Act’s “good faith” requirement to meet their small business subcontracting goals (learn more).
- Establishes a new prototyping pilot program for small businesses and nontraditional defense contractors to develop new and innovative technologies (learn more).
- Will extend the life of the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs (learn more).
We’ll keep digging into these topics and what they mean for your federal contracting success. Stay tuned!
