Contractors Almanac

All Opinions expressed are my own. Once upon a time, back when the Federal Acquisition Regulation still felt mildly comprehensible, we had a relatively tidy definition of cloud computing. NIST Special Publication 800-145 provided us with a framework:  Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).  It wasn’t perfect, but at least it gave contracting officers, vendors, and program managers a shared language. Then Congress got creative. Thanks to Section 809 of the FY24 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the Department of Defense now has a new procurement experiment: the  Anything-as-a-Service (AaaS) Pilot Program . The name alone is a red flag. Anything? Really? And yes, they mean it. In early May 2025, the Office of the Director for Defense Pricing, Contracting, and Acquisition Policy (DPCAP) released guidance expanding the definition of AaaS far beyond its cloud roots. Under this new model, a wide arr...

By someone who remembers when a DoD RFP had the word “simplified” in it, unironically. All opinions are my own. It started, as most federal shakeups do, with a signature, a pen, and a podium flanked by too many flags. On April 9, 2025, President Donald J. Trump signed   Executive Order 14192 : “Modernizing Defense Acquisitions and Spurring Innovation in the Defense Industrial Base.” If that sounds like a lot of words to say “DoD, go faster,” you’re not wrong. But in true Trumpian fashion, it wasn’t just a policy. It was a statement. A dare. A late-stage sequel to acquisition reform efforts going back to Goldwater-Nichols, with less red tape and more red meat. “Cancel it. Fix it. Or move it to the private sector.” At the heart of EO 14192 is a not-so-gentle command: The Pentagon is to  review every Major Defense Acquisition Program (MDAP) —you know, the big ones, the billion-dollar behemoths that fund entire congressional districts—and determine if they’re behind schedule or ov...