Must read for companies competing in the U.S. federal market. Thanks Robert Turner!
🗞️ H.R. 2804 ("Rule of Two") moving out of the House Small Business Committee unanimously is a real signal. Not a final victory. But a real signal. It changes how you plan, how you protect pipeline, how you respond to RFIs, and how aggressively you push back when work that should be set aside starts drifting into unrestricted channels. The practical impact is this: 💡 If the Rule of Two is codified in statute, small business access becomes harder to weaken through FAR rewrites, policy shifts, or agency-level interpretation, giving small businesses a more durable footing when they argue that an opportunity should be or remain set aside. 💡 More work is flowing through large IDIQs, GWACs, MACs, schedules, and task-order environments. The small business fight is no longer just about open-market set-asides. It is about whether agencies apply meaningful small business discipline inside the vehicles where the work actually lives. The House Committee version appears to narrow the bill by excluding task and delivery orders. The Senate version reportedly keeps them in scope. That difference goes directly to where many small businesses now compete every day. 🌟 RECOMMENDATION: SB's should consider four behavioral changes: 1. Treat RFIs and sources sought notices as strategic events, not administrative chores. If two or more capable small businesses exist, the record must show that. Up your RFI response game starting now! 2. Build a stronger internal record of capability, past performance, and fair-market-price support so you can make the set-aside argument credibly. 3. Watch task-order acquisition strategy more closely. The vehicle-level award is only half the game. The ordering rules determine whether you actually get access to the work. 4. Stay engaged through industry associations, congressional outreach, and agency feedback channels. Committee passage is momentum, not enactment. Codification into federal law would not magically create opportunities. But it will strengthen the legal foundation that small businesses rely on when agencies decide whether work belongs in the small-business lane. #govcon #idiq #gwac #smallbusiness #cfr #federallaw #businessdevelopment
