u/Character_Project715

As sellers, what's your take on wildly different eBuy RFQs?

Take UTVs - small utility vehicles - commonly purchased on eBuy. Some RFQs are, literally, one sentence long. 'Me want UTV, deliver here.'

Others, for the same thing, are >10 pages long. 'Our 5-page RFQ is attached as an SF 1449, refer to Attachment 1 for specifications, Attachment 2 for instructions and evaluation criteria, and Attachment 3, (Amendment 2) for FAR, Departmental, and Agency clauses and provisions. Questions are due...'

One of these is wrong, right?

Does this variance effect your efforts to sell us the stuff we want to buy from you?

Background: I am a CO, I use eBuy occasionally. I am baffled by this variance. My RFQs are basically an order - everything that will be on the signed order is in the RFQ but often wonder if I should go with the one-sentence approach. If none of that stuff (like clauses) matters for posting an RFQ, am I wasting my time? Do y'all have a preference?

The DoD does contracting differently from civilian agencies. Everything is bigger over there. The requirements, the price tags, the workforce, the rule book, the resources.

I am thinking about this because I recently spent an hour of my life doing some mandatory training about commercial items. The DoD has, at least in that presentation, elaborate procedures - a whole group of people - for determine whether something is commercial or not. In my civilian agency, this is done informally. Everything is commercial except a few things that aren't - and it's an easy call. No DCMA consultation required, ever.

Another: The DFARS threshold for a written acquisition plan is $50MM for total value. My civilian agency's threshold was, until recently, $0.35MM. A different so large its best expressed in orders of magnitude (2).

Anyways, for those of you who've spent time in both worlds, what are the differences that stand out to you?

I'm a fed 1102, so I genuinely wonder about this.

Most of federal contracting doesn't touch sam.gov. If you only use sam.gov, you don't know what's going on, right? So how do you know what's going on? That's the question.

Context: In my department - HHS - sam.gov is involved for relatively few new contracts/orders - somewhere between <10% and (at a theoretical maximum) 40%.

For IT, an actual solicitation was posted to sam.gov for at most 5% of new IT awards - but the real number is probably a rounding error away from zero. This makes sense - the vast majority of IT is available from the many existing sources (GSA alone has so many).

Every force is pushing us to use open market only as a last resort. So less will show up there. So how do you all deal with this?

HHS lost 40% of its 1102s between November 2024 and February 2026. HHS was the hardest hit, by far, of anywhere in the federal government when it comes to acquisition loses.

How is it going HHS 1102s?

	Nov-24	Feb-26
ADMINISTRATION FOR CHILDREN AND FAMILIES	90	2
ADMINISTRATION FOR COMMUNITY LIVING	1	0
ADMINISTRATION FOR STRATEGIC PREPAREDNESS AND RESPONSE	104	52
AGENCY FOR HEALTHCARE RESEARCH AND QUALITY	16	0
CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION	160	65
CENTERS FOR MEDICARE & MEDICAID SERVICES	173	121
FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION	91	79
HEALTH RESOURCES AND SERVICES ADMINISTRATION	42	19
INDIAN HEALTH SERVICE	151	141
NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH	511	223
OFFICE OF INSPECTOR GENERAL	2	1
OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES	114	182
SUBSTANCE ABUSE AND MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES ADMINISTRATION	15	0
HHS Total	1470	885

All this data is public and available at https://data.opm.gov/explore-data/data/data-downloads