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Following up on his repeated promises that the government will buy American and hire American, President Trump signed a Presidential Executive Order on Buy American and Hire American (the “Order”) on Tuesday, April 18, 2017, directing executive agencies to enhance acquisition preferences for domestic products and labor under federal contracts and federal grants. Federal contractors should note that the Order serves only as a blueprint for the administration’s intentions and imposes no immediate requirements. Those will follow — but in what form and to what degree, we can only guess. Contractors should prepare for those changes and be assured that – with respect to the Order’s impact on supply chains and contractor purchasing systems – the devil will indeed be in the details.
Continue Reading The Buy American–Hire American Executive Order: There Will Be Devils in the Details When Buying American

In the course of responding to a Request for Proposals (“RFP”) or Request for Quotations (“RFQ”), have you ever encountered technical specifications that you regard as unreasonable? Have you ever wondered why the Government included those specifications in the first place and, more generally, whether those specifications are even necessary to fulfill the requirements giving rise to the acquisition? If your company is like most out there, the answer to these questions is a resounding “yes!” What to do next, you ask? A recent case before the Government Accountability Office (“GAO”) is instructive.
Continue Reading Recent GAO Decision Gives Ammunition To Protesters Challenging Technical Specifications

On August 8, 2016, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (“OMB”) promulgated an Open Source Software (“OSS”) policy via the Memorandum for the Heads of Departments and Agencies, M-16-21 (“Memorandum” or “M-16-21”). The high-level purposes of the Memorandum are to promote reuse of federal contractor and employee custom-developed code, and to improve the quality of such software through public participation. To these ends, the Memorandum has two major directives: (1) all custom-developed code must be broadly available for reuse across the federal government subject to limited exceptions (e.g., for national security and defense) and (2) under a three-year pilot program, federal agencies are required to release at least 20% of their custom-developed code to the public as OSS. The intent here is to enable continual quality improvements to the code as a result of broader public community efforts. As discussed below, the requirement to release custom-developed code as OSS may effectively reduce the creator’s ownership rights, and have economic impacts on both the value of ownership and pricing when bidding on government contracts.
Continue Reading U.S. Government Open Source Software: OMB’s Memorandum on Federal Source Code Policy Exposes IP Ownership Risk