These good government groups complain about this stuff, but they are the reason we have this ridiculous situation. Google "New York State Appendix A" for a good example of standard contract terms that you need to comply with to do business with that state government. Examples include:
- You must certify that you don't use certain tropical hardwoods.
- You must report on minority and female employees in some circumstances. You must meet goals for hiring subcontractors owned by the same.
- You need to certify that you've divested assets in Iran
- You must certify that you don't discriminate against Catholics in Northern Ireland.
Understanding how to navigate this stuff and not get in trouble requires "fixers" (ie. lobbyists, congressmen, etc) and domain expertise to stay compliant with everything. Competitors have to meet these too, and will submit grievances to screw up your contract awards. For a startup, that's death, as you'll hire people and buy stuff, and not get paid.
Yes, certifying against every possible negative that some arbitrary entity had the wherewithal to lobby for is silly.
You make laws and prosecute the offenders, you don't make everyone you do business with pay money to prove that they don't engage in every possible negative activity.
It's not ridiculous, but it can be costly to document and certify in a non-standard method that upsets your routine workflow. In a larger entity, you can soak the hit and assign it to someone to deal with who maybe has some spare time or a pool of time spread across a few staff, in a smaller start-up, you may not have this flexibility. Legal adds up pretty quickly too, if they're dealing with compliance issues.
Edit: and that's just one part of a larger process for one state. I just had to have an independent contractor working in the UK apply to be registered as a valid sub contractor in NYS, and certify that he (a sole proprietor) carries adequate worker's comp... Multiply by 50 for states, throw in municipalities (I'm looking at you SF/NYC) and the feds and then add in different agencies, everyone has their own idiosyncracies. Unless you target one state, one agency, you're in for a world of pain on compliance.
The ridiculous situation isn't using endangered wood, it's doing business with the government entity as a startup. And if you want to do business in Delaware, or Chicago, or the DoD, or Vermont, you need to figure out 50 other things.
Here's the thing -- all of these things are at some level logical. Companies shouldn't discriminate against people and cut down rain forests. But the proposition asked by this article and thread is "Why can't startups get government contracts?"
End of the day, to do business with big government entities, you need to spend many dollars on attorneys and lobbyists before you make a cent. And after closing the sale, you need to maintain staff to be SMEs on all of the various compliance regimes that you need to comply with. You need to be big to swim in those waters.
> Is it really "ridiculous" to not use endangered tropical woods
Let's say that I buy an antique desk. I might have an endangered tropical hardwood, but it was cut LONG before the law even existed!
Or what if I buy reclaimed teak from an old steamship deck and turn that into a lovely couch. It was harvested 150 years ago, perhaps even before the US civil war. But I wouldn't be able to certify, would I? How is that reasonable?
The point isn't that it's crazy to expect people to behave like good citizens, it's that there are a ton of corner cases that the requirements don't address because they were written as "feel good" not as "this is actually good"
Yes, it is ridiculous. I can not imagine how the choice to use tropical woods, or the number of minority employees would impact the final result of a business contract. The government should be concerned with the end result, not the minutia.
This sort of detail-peddling is why only massive corporations can attain government contracts. Regulatory capture is the inevitable end result.
The government is concerned with the shape of the society it represents as well as the end result. Accepting some inefficiency for social good is a feature, not a bug. Even when it makes you mad.
And, as described numerous times elsewhere in this thread, it's not that hard for small companies to get governmental work. But the process is different, for reasons that are not themselves unreasonable, and most don't really want to play with stuff like FAR. (Which is part of why many large governmental contracts require subcontracting to small companies--itself but the most efficient process, but a good one for growing those small companies.)
The government is concerned with the shape of the society it represents as well as the end result.
No it isn't, it's concerned with perpetuating itself and its bureaucracy and maintaining whatever hold on power it and its people have established... and with grabbing more power when and where possible. Any social good the government does is just a happy accident / side effect.
The federal government is not a for-profit corporation intent on profit. Consider it more as a social service mission driven non-profit. Federal contracting is mission-driven by specific regulation, whether it be defense or health or transportation or whatever. The US govt. is not about end results, it's about process which hopefully leads to end results. The US, as a people, through the voice of the elected federal government, has determined that taxpayer dollars should not fund tropical hardwoods but should fund the growth of minority-owned businesses. Agree or disagree on the goals, that is the mission of those tax dollars.
As a contractor seeking to spend those tax dollars, you are effectively signing up to help execute on the US population's stated goals as a people, not achieve the best business result for a government agency. Until you understand this, government contracting is not for you.
As for disruptive start-ups, in my 15 years working on state and federal contracts, every single agency that has requested "innovation", "disruptive change", "modern technologies" in fact means "please do this 95% of the way we did it last time, but add some shiny magic so we can feel good about progress".
As with any customer, your goal should be to give the customer what they want, while educating them about what they need. At the end of the day, you need to make your customer happy, and for a federal agency that often means don't fail, don't get their name in the paper. Which generally comes from doing it in a predictable fashion with incremental change.
The federal government is not a for-profit corporation intent on profit.
Not on paper, no. In practice, it's a massive mechanism to transfer wealth to the rich, connected, insiders and the sycophants who hover around them and suck at their teat.
As with any customer, your goal should be to give the customer what they want, while educating them about what they need. At the end of the day, you need to make your customer happy, and for a federal agency that often means don't fail, don't get their name in the paper. Which generally comes from doing it in a predictable fashion with incremental change.
So very true. "Not getting their name in the paper" is probably a good idea for most customers.
- You must certify that you don't use certain tropical hardwoods.
- You must report on minority and female employees in some circumstances. You must meet goals for hiring subcontractors owned by the same.
- You need to certify that you've divested assets in Iran
- You must certify that you don't discriminate against Catholics in Northern Ireland.
Understanding how to navigate this stuff and not get in trouble requires "fixers" (ie. lobbyists, congressmen, etc) and domain expertise to stay compliant with everything. Competitors have to meet these too, and will submit grievances to screw up your contract awards. For a startup, that's death, as you'll hire people and buy stuff, and not get paid.