Same Old Other Transaction Question, Worse Answers

I’m tired. No. No, I’m weary—bone weary. 

I will seriously, totally, completely lose it if one more person asks me if they should choose an Other Transaction agreement or a FAR-based contract. 

No, I mean it. Part of me doesn’t want to be so negative, but I’m just at my wit’s end.

Why does this have to be so hard? 

Which to choose?  My answer has been the same since I was first asked in 1997: “It depends.”  Yes, that’s the quintessential Contracting Officer’s answer, but it’s also true.

It depends…on a lot of things, but mostly the same kinds of things that it depends on when you’re trying to decide which type of contract to use for a FAR-based contract. 

What are you buying? What are the risks? How can you mitigate those risks? Do you want to incentivize the contractor? Are you looking for more flexibility? Are you looking for more control? What are your concerns about intellectual property and data rights? What does your market research say? What economic conditions, climate conditions, real-world wars, supply chain issues, obsolescence issues, and more-more-more-more-more affect your situation? What’s the risk of falling behind our peers and near-peers if we don’t move fast enough? Who’s the customer, and how many lives will be lost if we’re late to a solution?

See? All the same things you ask, regardless of the business arrangement you use for the actual contract or agreement. They’re all tools—just tools. Some are better than others in certain situations, but they’re all tools in your Contracting toolbelt, there for you to use your brain to figure out which one is optimal for whatever it is you need to buy.

The answer to this question that just makes me want to cry is when the Contracting Officer says they choose to use the less optimal tool because of restrictions put on them, even when the perfect tool for the situation is available. Other Transaction agreements come with certain freedoms, but no, we can’t have this freedom because we have to put exponentially more restrictions on them than we would on a good ol’ FAR-based contract. It’s a shame that otherwise fast-moving tools are burdened with so much unnecessary oversight that we choose a lesser tool just to meet our deadline—a lesser tool that is known for being much slower. 

None of this is about tools. It’s about mindset. It’s always about the mindset. These tools have been around for decades—longer than my entire DoD career. 

Why do we even bother to ask Congress for new tools? Are we thinking that’s our silver bullet? 

Whatever tools we’re given that will help us go faster, smarter, smoother, cheaper—does it matter? These tools are just going to get weighed down and crushed to the point that nobody wants to use them because they can’t spare the extra time or avoid the bruises on their foreheads from beating their heads against their desks. You don’t kill good tools by ignoring them, but by focusing so many restrictions and additional oversight on them that no one wants to touch them. And it’s not for fear of doing it wrong, but the crushing extra effort to do them at all.

And don’t get me started on Middle Tier of Acquisition (MTA)—and some of the action to add more freedoms with MTA—that are simply, if historical patterns hold true, going to get more layers of bureaucracy and local policies slapped on top of them, making MTA useless, as so many in my network have told me. 

For all the bragging about how innovative we are in 2025, the aperture for using new tools—or new-to-us tools—is smaller now than it was a whole generation ago. Choosing a business arrangement type or an acquisition pathway based solely on how much additional bureaucracy will be added to the already slow acquisition process is going in the wrong direction. 

I know, I know.  I’m being negative.  Bah, humbug, and happy (bureaucratic) New Year.