Nearly every year, the battle over appropriations creates great angst in the contractor community. Who will the winners and losers be? For proposal professionals, the question as to when the appropriations will be completed is even more important than how large they will be. When the appropriations are late, there isn’t enough band width for the procurement shops to process all the work. So many programs are pushed into simple IFB vehicles or into the next fiscal year.

We are now coming to the end of the slowest year in the century for RFP releases. The preponderance of educated opinion is that, this has been caused by the slowness of the president in getting his team of political appointees onboard. Because agencies have lacked the leadership in the top procurement positions, the career civil servants have been reluctant to initiate RFP releases because of fear that the senior personnel might reverse their decisions when they arrive.

The delay in RFP releases has the side effect of pushing more business into 2018.

Following below are the predictions of Alan Chvotkin – EVP of the Professional Services Council (PSC) — regarding the progress of the appropriations in the near future:

Congress will further punt on the FY 18 appropriations until January (tentatively January 19th). While the House will pass a full year FY18 appropriations for defense, coupled with a further continuing resolution for the rest of the federal government until January, the Senate is likely to reject that and agree to only a further continuing resolution for all of government until January. End result will likely be that we will have a one-year (FY18) agreement on spending for both defense and non-defense agencies sometime in January. [This is relatively early.]

Net net is the widely shared conclusion that 2018 is going to be a much better year for contractors and proposal professionals than 2017.