As we wrote back in November 2021, the Biden Administration issued Executive Order 14055 reinstating most of the concepts from the Obama Administration era nondisplacement Executive Order 13495. Two months after Biden’s imposed deadline of May 2022, the U.S. Department of Labor finally published proposed regulations on July 15, 2022.

Generally speaking, EO 14055 and the proposed Nondisplacement regulations require successor contractors to make offers of employment to all predecessor contractor Service Contract Act covered employees who worked on the predecessor contract. Predecessor contractors are required to prepare and submit a list of their Service Contract Act covered employees to the contracting officer at least 30 days prior to contract termination. The contracting officer then provides a copy of that list to the successor contractor who then is required to make bona fide job offers to the predecessor’s service employees who worked on the prior contract. The rollout of these new regulations is of the utmost importance to any federal contractor or subcontractor with employees subject to the Service Contract Act.
Continue Reading Nondisplacement of Qualified Workers Under Service Contracts – Proposed Regulations Issued

The Court of Federal Claims (CoFC) recently held that an offeror was not obligated to inform the agency of staffing changes, affecting its key personnel, that occurred following its proposal submission. This new CoFC decision conflicts with longstanding GAO precedent.

Key personnel are often a significant part of proposals and can greatly increase or diminish

On November 30, 2021, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky, in Kentucky v. Biden, et al., No. 3:21-cv-00055, granted a preliminary injunction limiting the enforcement of the federal vaccine mandate for some federal contractors and subcontractors. The preliminary injunction was requested by the Commonwealth of Kentucky, the State of Ohio, and the State of Tennessee. As a result, the court enjoined the federal government “from enforcing the vaccine mandate for federal contractors and subcontractors in all covered contracts in Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee” pending further briefing and a full resolution of the case on its merits.
Continue Reading Kentucky Court Blocks Federal Contractor Vaccine Mandate

As predicted, another Obama Administration “oldie but goodie” has made a return in the Biden Administration.  On November 18, 2021, President Biden issued a new Executive Order entitled “Executive Order on Nondisplacement of Qualified Workers Under Service Contracts.” Many of the same concepts and requirements have returned, but there are also several notable changes.
Continue Reading Nondisplacement of Qualified Workers is Back, But With Changes

On September 10, 2021, the FAR Council published a final rule amending the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) to clarify how contracting officers should evaluate a prime contractor’s “good faith efforts” to comply with a small business subcontracting plan.
Continue Reading FAR Council Publishes Update to Small Business Subcontracting Regulations

This past week, the FAR Council issued a proposed rule that would potentially speed up payments to small business prime contractors and subcontractors across the federal government. The proposed rule, found at 86 Fed. Reg. 53,923, seeks to incentivize agencies to pay prime contractors that are small businesses within 15 days instead of 30 days after receipt of a proper invoice if no payment date is specified in the contract. It also would apply to prime contractors that subcontract with small businesses, applying a similar 15-day requirement to pay small subcontractors when accelerated payments are received. According to the proposed rule, the FAR Council will apply this to most federal contracts by seeking determinations to make this new rule applicable to commercial contracts as well as those under the Simplified Acquisition Threshold.
Continue Reading New Proposed Rule Seeks to Implement Accelerated Payments to Small Business Contractors Across the Government

For years, I have been blogging and speaking about the very real and very serious civil and potential criminal consequences of a failure to comply with the Davis Bacon Act.  Every once in a while, a case comes along that drives those points home.  One such case – involving criminal convictions for wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud in connection with what appears to be a blatant failure to comply with Davis Bacon Act requirements – is the recent decision in United States v. Estepa, No. 19-12272 (11th Cir. May 25, 2021).
Continue Reading Egregious Davis Bacon Act Violations Can Lead To Criminal Convictions

Mentor-protégé programs, such as the government-wide one at the SBA for all small business concerns, are designed to help small contractors engage in federal contracting by allowing larger, more experienced mentor firms to provide assistance to protégés. Generally, the proteges receive financial, technical, or management aid from mentors, and the mentors may receive subcontracting goal credits, reimbursement of expenses, and other incentives in return. One of the key concepts behind these programs is to increase the capacity of small business concerns to compete for contracts they would not ordinarily qualify for otherwise. The U.S. Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) recent decision in Innovate Now, LLC, B-419546, Apr. 26, 2021, confirmed this underlying principle.
Continue Reading GAO Confirms Yet Another Benefit of Mentor-Protégé Programs

Under the Christian Doctrine, prime contractors face the risk of having a court or a board of contract appeals read a clause into their contracts, even if it was omitted from the contract that they signed. In this entry we discuss whether the Christian Doctrine applies to subcontractors.

The Christian Doctrine is almost certainly inapplicable to subcontractors. For the reasons why, consider the decision in Energy Labs, Inc. v. Edwards Engineering, Inc., (N.D. Ill. June 2, 2015). A subcontractor contracted to manufacture and deliver HVAC systems for the Chicago Transit Authority. In its own contract, the prime contractor certified that the HVAC system would comply with the Buy America Act. But the prime contractor failed to flow the requirement down to the HVAC manufacturer, which planned to manufacture the units in Mexico. After learning that the plan to manufacture the units in Mexico would not meet the Buy America requirement, the prime contractor canceled the order and purchased the units from another manufacturer.

The original manufacturer sued for breach of contract. In its motion to dismiss, the prime contractor made two arguments. The subcontract was “illegal” because it omitted the Buy America requirement. Or it was legal only because the Christian Doctrine meant that the Buy America requirement was read into the subcontract by operation of law. The court rejected both arguments. There was nothing “illegal” about the prime’s failure to include a Buy America requirement in the subcontract. And there was no basis to read the requirement into the subcontract through the Christian Doctrine. “The Christian doctrine . . . was intended to apply to contracts between the federal government and government contractors, not to subcontracts.”

This result is consistent with our experience.
Continue Reading Does the Christian Doctrine apply to subcontractors?

Earlier this year we wrote about the final regulation consolidating most of the Federal Small Business Mentor-Protégé program under one office at the Small Business Administration. See 81 Fed. Reg. 48558 (July 25, 2016). The regulation expands the popular Mentor-Protégé program and should provide significant benefits to many more large and small companies. You can read our original post here.

One of the questions raised in comments on the draft regulation was how the SBA would cope with the expected significant increase in its workload. Accuracy and turn-around time are important elements of the SBA’s review role. In the final regulation, SBA generally addressed those concerns by promising to find new and improved ways to deliver the service. They committed to take one step at a time and scale up as needed.

It has now been five months since the final rule was published. We asked SBA Mentor-Protégé Director Holly Schick for a progress report on the transition. Director Schick says that the SBA has moved steadily if incrementally, to ramp-up the program.Continue Reading Progress Report: SBA Mentor-Protégé Program rolls out and moves forward