Promoting Value Based Procurement Act of 2017

Promoting Value Based Procurement Act of 2017

This bill declares that it shall be U.S. government policy to avoid using lowest price technically acceptable source selection criteria in circumstances that would deny the government the benefits of cost and technical trade-offs.

The Federal Acquisition Regulation shall be revised to require that such criteria shall be used for solicitations only when:

• an executive agency is able to comprehensively describe the minimum requirements in terms of performance objectives, measures, and standards that will be used to determine acceptability of offers;
• the agency would realize no, or minimal, value from a contract proposal exceeding the minimum technical or performance requirements set forth in the request for proposal;
• the proposed technical approaches will require no, or minimal, subjective judgment by the selection authority as to the desirability of one offeror's proposal versus a competing proposal;
• such authority has a high degree of confidence that a review of technical proposals of offerors other than the lowest bidder would not result in identifying factors that could provide value or benefit to the agency;
• the contracting officer has included a justification for the use of a lowest price technically acceptable evaluation methodology in the contract file; and
• the agency has determined that the lowest price reflects full life-cycle costs.

The use of such criteria shall be avoided for a procurement that is predominately for the acquisition of:

• information technology, cybersecurity, systems engineering and technical assistance, advanced electronic testing, or audit or audit readiness services or other knowledge-based professional services;
• personal protective equipment; or
• knowledge-based training or logistics services in operations outside the United States.

The Government Accountability Office shall report annually for four years on the number of instances in which such criteria is used for a contract exceeding $2 million.