Defense Dept. Buyers Must Press for Lower Prices Defense Department buyers cannot accept a contractor’s offered price on any contract that receives only one bid. Instead, they must seek a reduced price, according to new guidance issued by Shay Assad, director of defense procurement and acquisition policy. The April 27 memo grows out of DOD’s Better Buying Power initiative. Under the policy, if a solicitation was advertised for less than 30 days and received only a single offer, the contracting officer must cancel it and resolicit it. If only one offer is received on a solicitation after 30 days or more, the contracting officer must use price and cost analysis to determine a fair and reasonable price, and negotiate with the offeror if necessary. The final price must not be higher than the original offer. “I recognize that implementation of this policy may have the unintended consequence of increasing the contracting community’s workload,” Assad wrote, “but given today’s scarcity of resources we need to ensure effective competition to the maximum extent possible.” In the September Better Buying Power memo, Ashton Carter, undersecretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, ordered a sharper focus on those RFPs that attract just one offer. A new report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies finds that contract dollars awarded competitively with a single offer have grown nearly twice as fast as contracts receiving multiple offers in recent years.