The Office That Posts the RFP Twice

On Aug. 6, Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane posted a draft of a solicitation nobody had to answer yet. The real RFP for that work did not exist for another 57 days.

Anyone who read the draft spent those 57 days knowing what was coming. Anyone who waited for the solicitation got seven days in October.

Crane did it again on Nov. 2.

The notice is N0016427SNC14, it releases draft RFP N0016427R3009 for non-personal professional, engineering, technical assessment and management support services to the Global Deterrence and Defense Department, and the stated purpose is to collect "feedback, questions, and recommendations from industry prior to the issuance of the formal Request for Proposals."

Comments close Nov. 16. That is 14 days to tell a contracting officer what is wrong with their solicitation before it becomes the one you have to price.

"Why would a contracting office show you the solicitation before it has to?"

What the Record Actually Shows

Crane posted 502 notices in the twelve months to Nov. 3. Five of them carry a draft or an advance notice in the title, and four of those five are professional support services, all four since Aug. 6.

The fifth was a spares buy back in January.

So this is a habit, and a recent one. The four:

Aug. 6, N0016426SNC00, PMS 470 professional support services, 15 days to comment.
Oct. 9, N0016426SNB39, acquisition engineering and product support to the Maritime Electromagnetic Warfare Division, 14 days.
Oct. 21, N0016426R3003_DRAFT, DRPM RAS professional support services, 9 days.
Nov. 2, the live one above, 14 days.

All four sit at NAICS 541330. Three of the four carry a small-business or SDVOSB set-aside.

The One Sequence That Already Finished

Only one of those drafts has had its real RFP post, which makes PMS 470 the only place to check whether reading the draft was worth anything.

The draft went up Aug. 6 and took comments until Aug. 21. The formal RFP, N0016426R3120, posted Oct. 2 and closed Oct. 9.

Same NAICS, same PSC R425, same SBA set-aside, same contracting officer on both notices. It is the same requirement, and the two windows are nothing alike (chart below).

The draft gave 15 days to respond. The formal RFP gave 7.

Now, the response window is the smaller half of the story.

A capture lead who only watched for solicitations learned this requirement existed on Oct. 2 and had seven days. One who watched for drafts learned on Aug. 6 and had 64.

Fifty-seven of those days were free. The requirement was public, the scope was readable, and nobody was being asked for a priced proposal yet.

Three Notices Out of 1,667

We pulled every Defense notice published between Oct. 30 and midday Nov. 3: 1,667 of them. Three were draft solicitations.

The other two were SPAWAR Lant, on a Maintenance Figure of Merit software engineering support draft, and Army Contracting Command at Aberdeen Test Center, on welding and fabrication services. Crane was the third.

Two more notices matched on the word "draft" and were thrown out, both USACE dredge leases specifying a vessel draft not to exceed nine feet. Which is its own small lesson about keyword alerts.

The Set-Aside That Moved

The Maritime Electromagnetic Warfare thread is the one we would point a small business at.

Crane opened it as an RFI and sources-sought on June 23, under the same notice number it would later reuse for the draft. The June notice says the government intends to set the procurement aside for Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business SeaPort MAC holders "based on a comprehensive review."

The draft RFP followed on Oct. 9, still SDVOSB, 108 days after the market research that chose the set-aside.

That is market research doing the thing it is supposed to do and leaving a dated paper trail while it does. Most sources-sought notices never visibly change anything.

Final Thoughts

None of this makes Crane unusual on the things that are easy to measure. We did not pull their protest history, we have no dollar figures on any of these four requirements, and the same 502-notice record contains Crane services solicitations that went out cold with a five-day response window and no draft at all. The habit is real on the requirements that get it, and we would not stretch it further than that.

What the PMS 470 sequence does settle is where the work actually happens. The solicitation is the end of a process you were invited to influence in August, and the seven-day window at the end is the part everybody sees.

If you cover SeaPort-NxG, the Nov. 16 comment deadline is the cheapest thing on your calendar this month.

Thanks for reading.