A total of 95 entities — 31 large businesses and 64 small businesses — received awards under the sequel to the Information Technology Supplies and Support Services contract, also known as ITSSS, the agency said in an update on SAM.gov. The new agreement will serve as the primary vehicle for the agency’s IT services for the next eight years.

The award marks the largest contract vehicle for IT services ever established by the FBI, according to the agency. Investments for the previous ITSSS totaled over $2 billion. 

“ITSSS-2 will provide the FBI with streamlined acquisition procedures and a vetted Vendor Pool to establish call orders more efficiently,” the agency said in the update. 

The FBI also noted that it will establish “a forecasting tool to identify upcoming requirements on a timely basis and to allow ITSSS-2 vendors to appropriately plan their proposals.” The bureau said it will be holding informational meetings with stakeholders in coming weeks.

Efforts to create the vehicle began in December 2021 when the FBI partnered with the General Services Administration on the blanket purchase agreement, according to the agency’s updates SAM.gov. In February 2024, the bureau said it was in the last phase of evaluation but an award wouldn’t be made until bid protest challenges to the contract filed with the Government Accountability Office were resolved. 

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The platform is built on the customer relationship management software company’s existing Einstein 1 platform and includes features to transcribe calls for contact center workers and assist caseworkers with generating reports and documenting information.

“This is the kind of work that requires a lot of expertise and there’s never enough people to handle it,” Casey Coleman, senior vice president of global government solutions at Salesforce, told FedScoop in an interview on the sidelines of the company’s conference in Washington. 

Coleman said the system will cut down administrative time for government employees and “leave the experts to do the job of really interacting with people and making sure that the answer is provided to them.”

The announcement came during the company’s “World Tour D.C.” event, which included panels with multiple government customers from agencies like the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Internal Revenue Service. 

Other software companies — such as IBM and Microsoft — have also announced new AI tools for government in recent months, as interest in the technology continues to grow in the public sector. Meanwhile, the Biden administration is working to create guidance for procurement of those tools. The Office of Management and Budget is planning action on federal procurement of AI later this year and released a request for information on that work.

Coleman said interest in AI from public sector partners has “spiked up,” particularly for uses related to administrative work and things that can be tested quickly.

“Every conversation we have with public sector customers, or prospective customers, includes AI to some degree,” Coleman said. “Everyone is thinking about it — everyone is looking for use cases to test it on.”

Also on Wednesday, Salesforce announced that its Field Service, Privacy Center and Security Center tools are authorized for FedRAMP’s “high” impact level and the Department of Defense’s “Impact Level 5,” which means they’re cleared to be used with the government’s most sensitive unclassified data. GovSlack also achieved FedRAMP “high” authorization in February. 

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That request was part of the additional relief Ultima Services Corp. asked the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee to provide in a Friday motion. The court’s previous decision enjoined the use of a “rebuttable presumption” that certain business owners qualifying for the SBA’s 8(a) federal contracting program faced social disadvantage because of their race or ethnicity. 

Ultima argued the court should grant the additional industry-specific relief “because Ultima is still suffering from the lingering effects of defendants’ discrimination.”

It also cited the Supreme Court’s ruling striking down the use of race in college admissions, arguing preventative measures are warranted to ensure the defendants, which include SBA, aren’t establishing the type of application essay program the court ruled unlawful for universities. 

The motion is the latest in a case that threw the keystone SBA contracting program into uncertainty. The lawsuit began in 2020 when Ultima, a small business government contractor, filed a complaint alleging that the program’s rebuttable presumption was racially discriminatory. Ultima’s owner, Celeste Bennett, is a white woman and wasn’t eligible for the presumption. In court documents, Ultima claimed it lost out on opportunities for USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service to businesses in the program.

As a result of the court’s July injunction, the SBA temporarily paused new 8(a) applications and began requiring businesses in the program that relied on the rebuttable presumption to prove social disadvantage in a narrative detailing past discrimination before they can accept new contract awards.

In the new motion, Ultima said it “disagrees with Defendants’ interpretation of the existing injunction.”

In addition to seeking an injunction of the program’s use in its industry, Ultima also asked the court to prevent SBA from exercising contract options or making similar modifications to contracts with 8(a) businesses who relied on the rebuttable presumption, and “providing a shortened or less rigorous review of narratives of social disadvantage” than the agency did before the court’s injunction. 

Ultima further asked the court to appoint someone to review the SBA’s certification for 8(a) participants who previously relied on the rebuttable presumption or make public the narratives those businesses now must submit for certification that explain their social disadvantage. 

Until the requests for additional relief are resolved, Ultima requested the court to temporarily enjoin the defendants from taking actions on 8(a) contracts with businesses that relied on the rebuttable presumption, regardless of whether the SBA approved their new narrative.

The U.S. Department of Justice, which represents the government defendants (SBA and USDA), declined to comment. Michael Rosman, general counsel for the Center for Individual Rights who represents Ultima, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

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The new “narrative” requirement for the Small Business Administration’s 8(a) Business Development program, which is aimed at opening the federal contracting world to disadvantaged businesses, comes in light of a recent court ruling enjoining its use of presumed racial and ethnic disadvantage as a qualification. 

While the narratives will allow the SBA to keep things moving, they also stand to jeopardize both participants’ membership in the program and their future 8(a) contract opportunities, lawyers and experts said in interviews with FedScoop. They stressed the importance of providing detailed narratives.

“Take it seriously. Take it very seriously. Because not only do you have to have the social narrative, it has to be approved by SBA,” said Robb Wong, a former associate administrator of the SBA’s Office of Government Contracting & Business Development who, in an earlier role at the agency, helped write the 8(a) program eligibility rules.

Without a narrative, Wong said businesses in the program won’t be able to get new contracts, and even with a narrative, there’s still a possibility that SBA could disapprove it and businesses could lose their 8(a) certification. 

The July ruling by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee struck down the program’s use of what’s known as a “rebuttable presumption” that certain racial and ethnic groups — including Black, Hispanic, and Asian Pacific Americans — have been subject to prejudice and are therefore socially disadvantaged. 

That presumption made it easier for businesses owned by people belonging to one of those groups to qualify for the program’s social disadvantage requirement. The court, however, said the presumption ran afoul of the constitutional right to equal protection. The opinion cited the Supreme Court’s ruling, just three weeks prior, that colleges can’t use race as a factor in admissions through affirmative action.

“The thing about these narratives is that they require a person to go into extensive detail about something that happened to them that they very well may want to forget,” said Matthew Moriarty, a federal contracting attorney and founding member of Schoonover & Moriarty who has helped clients with narratives.

Narratives have previously been a part of the application process for business owners outside the presumed groups wanting to establish social disadvantage for things like disability, religion, sexual orientation, and gender. The new guidance expands the pool of businesses who must complete them.

“I think people really need to consider these to be significant legal documents that have the chance to, unfortunately, at this point, make or break a business,” Moriarty said.

The 8(a) program is aimed at helping socially and economically disadvantaged businesses contract with the federal government over a period of nine years maximum. To qualify, businesses must be at least 51% owned and operated by one or more U.S. citizens who also meet social and economic disadvantage requirements. As participants in the program, businesses are able to get contract opportunities specifically set aside for the 8(a) program.

The Biden administration has sought to expand opportunities for the program, which is an important piece in its goal to achieve 15% of prime contracting awards going to small disadvantaged businesses by 2025. Awards for 8(a) businesses made up about 5.4% of all federal contracts awarded in fiscal year 2021, or roughly $34.4 billion, according to a Congressional Research Service report last year.

“As we work with the Department of Justice to continue reviewing the District Court’s ruling and evaluating the next steps, the SBA and Biden-Harris Administration remain committed to supporting this crucial program and the small business owners who have helped drive America’s strong economic growth,” SBA Administrator Isabella Casillas Guzman said in a statement announcing the new guidance Friday.

The SBA had previously announced a temporary suspension of new applications to comply with the court ruling, which is still in effect.

Under the new guidance, 8(a) participants were to receive letters Monday either detailing the process for creating a narrative or telling them they’ve already established disadvantage. SBA’s guidance also clarified that the new requirement doesn’t apply to businesses that previously established social disadvantage in a narrative or entity-owned firms, which refers to businesses owned by groups such as Indian tribes and Alaska Native Corporations. 

“The hardest part about the narrative — and frankly, this is the reason that even some attorneys struggle with the narrative — is it is a very unique meshing of emotional and detailed writing from kind of a personal perspective and one that is very hard for some people to relate to,” said Nicole Pottroff, an equity partner at Koprince McCall Pottroff LLC who specializes in 8(a) narratives.

The time period to complete those narratives if there is an active offer is tight. Generally, when companies get a contract offer, the SBA has about five days to accept it on that firm’s behalf, Pottroff said. 

But narratives, at least in the past, have taken time. Pottroff said the SBA typically comes back with questions asking for more information. She said clients have frequently come to her firm because everything else about their 8(a) applications is fine except for the narrative. 

“Even when we write fantastic narratives, the questions can be as simple as we’d like some more details on this event, or can you tell us a little more specifically how … you felt this event was based on bias,” Pottroff said. It’s not clear whether that will continue to be the norm, she said.

Narratives require business owners to outline exactly how they’ve experienced bias and discrimination based on their identity. That needs to be supported by detailed descriptions of incidents that show “chronic and substantial social disadvantage,” according to SBA guidance. Those descriptions should include “who, what, where, why, when, and how discrimination or bias occurred,” SBA says. 

While businesses can complete the narratives themselves, Pottroff said that the SBA’s requirements are very specific and recommended that companies that have the ability and resources seek assistance. However, Pottroff also said she hopes the SBA process generally gets easier so that more people can successfully complete them on their own.

Wong said whether a business owner should seek counsel depends on the person. He recommends business owners write their narratives in three sections for education, employment, and business with three examples each. “And try to be as specific as possible,” Wong said. 

Moriarty said those examples can include details as specific as what someone was wearing at the time or what car they were driving. 

While some delays or inconsistencies are possible with the change, Wong said he expects the end of the fiscal year to be “fairly unremarkable” for SBA. He voiced support for SBA’s longtime associate general counsel for procurement law, John Klein, who has shared guidance about the change with those in the 8(a) community. Wong said he believes Klein will come up with a solution that’s “efficient and effective for government.”

In the meantime, Moriarty emphasized “the clock is ticking” for businesses that want to be eligible for contract awards that are upcoming. 

“If you’re an 8(a) and there’s a contract that you have an eye on that you want to be insured that you’re eligible for, there is no time like the present to get moving on this thing,” Moriarty said.

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The Wednesday ruling from Judge Clifton L. Corker of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee enjoined the small business agency and the Department of Agriculture — both defendants in the case — from using a “rebuttable presumption of social disadvantage” in the SBA’s business development program known as “8(a).”

The opinion relies in part on the Supreme Court’s recent decision striking down the use of race in college admissions through affirmative action. It could have broad impact as the SBA manages the program across the U.S. government, federal contracting experts told FedScoop, though they noted its full scope isn’t clear and it will likely be appealed.

“It’s a significant blow to what really is the SBA’s crown jewel socioeconomic program,” Matthew Moriarty, a founding partner at Schoonover & Moriarty in Kansas who focuses on federal contracting.

The Small Business Administration, the Department of Agriculture, and the Justice Department, which represents the agencies, didn’t respond to requests for comment on whether they planned to appeal the decision.

In his opinion, Corker said use of a “rebuttable presumption” violated the Fifth Amendment rights of the company that brought the lawsuit, Ultima Services Corporation, to equal protection of the law. 

A “rebuttable presumption” is a legal term for something presumed true absent other evidence. The statute that established the 8(a) program, Small Business Act, uses that presumption in the section that defines certain racial and ethnic groups as socially disadvantaged. The 8(a) program is aimed at helping small businesses that are at least 51% owned and operated by a U.S. citizen who is socially and economically disadvantaged.

Corker said the agencies didn’t identify whether racial groups are underrepresented in specific industries that are relevant to contracts in the 8(a) program and didn’t outline the goals of the program.

“Without stated goals for the 8(a) program or an understanding of whether certain minorities are underrepresented in a particular industry, Defendants cannot measure the utility of the rebuttable presumption in remedying the effects of past racial discrimination,” Corker said.

The lawsuit began in March 2020 when Ultima, a small business government contractor, filed a complaint alleging that the rebuttable presumption in the program was racially discriminatory. The business is owned by Celeste Bennett, a white woman, and isn’t eligible for the presumption. In court documents, Ultima claimed it lost out on opportunities to businesses in the program.

“We’re pleased with the decision,” said Michael E. Rosman, general counsel for the Center for Individual Rights, who represents Ultima. “Defendants’ reservation of contracts for the Section 8(a) program was decimating to Ultima, shrinking its revenues by large proportions.  The order enjoins the use of a presumption that favored certain small businesses based solely on the race of their owners.”

Rosman said they believe the decision would preclude USDA from “reserving virtually every contract in Ultima’s industry for the program” and “will have significant positive effects outside of the USDA” as the Small Business Administration’s approval is needed to reserve contracts for the 8(a) program.

Whether the ruling impacts those currently in the program isn’t clear.

Emily W. Murphy, a senior fellow at the Greg and Camille Baroni Center for Government Contracting at George Mason University, said if the ruling stands, current participants in the program will likely have to prove their disadvantage.

If the injunction is going to remedy harm against Ultima, which is challenging how the program is being administered in favor of those currently in the 8(a) program, “it would suggest it has to apply to current participants,” said Murphy, former administrator of the General Services Administration and a former SBA contracting official.

While the opinion could be appealed, she said the administration will likely have to weigh the risks of such an action in the current legal environment. The SBA and DOJ are going to have to figure out how to maneuver through that because the ruling comes as the federal government is in its fourth quarter, where a majority of spending takes place, Murphy said. 

Others said impact on those in the program currently isn’t likely.

Moriarty said the decision is unlikely to impact current set-asides — contracts specifically designated for types of small businesses — and people currently in the program. But moving forward, the SBA can’t rely on the presumption that certain individuals are socially disadvantaged. Those businesses could still demonstrate disadvantage, but that process would likely be longer and more difficult, he said.

“So now, because of this injunction, all applicants, regardless of the type of person that they are, are going to have to demonstrate specific instances of social disadvantage in order to be granted entry into the program,” Moriarty said.

Antonio R. Franco, managing partner at Piliero Mazza in Washington focused on government contracting, also said he doesn’t believe the ruling would apply to people currently in the program, but that it could have a chilling effect on working with businesses in the program.

“The problem is going to be can those people still benefit from the program if agencies are reluctant to award contracts to these companies because they believe that they’re going to be challenged using this case,” Franco said.

The parties in the cases will meet next on Aug. 31 to discuss other potential remedies.

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Buck is a senior lawmaker who has urged the Defense Department to further investigate whether Amazon improperly influenced the procurement process for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract for cloud computing services and has been stonewalled in his attempts to get answers from the company itself.

In a recent interview with FedScoop, Buck talked about his new book on the matter — “Crushed: Big Tech’s War on Free Speech” – highlighting why government officials should be concerned about unfair monopolistic conduct by Big Tech companies and areas where the federal government could do more to hold the tech giants accountable.

Buck has repeatedly hammered Amazon for unduly favoring its own products on its website or creating cheaper copycats of existing products using internal data which he says is grossly unfair and illegal while he also supports bipartisan legislation that has been introduced in Congress that would prevent Amazon from such conduct.

“I do think that continuing to give Amazon huge government contracts at a time when they’ve acted in this way is really suspect. We should think twice about it,” Buck said during a wide-ranging interview with FedScoop.

“What Congress can do and certainly what inspectors general can do is to look at the way Amazon has conducted themselves in the bidding process for a contract. And if they have broken laws which they may have, they can be debarred from government contracts,” he added.

Buck highlighted that federal civilian agencies as well as intelligence agency employees should be aware of Amazon’s anti-competitive activities in the consumer realm because “Amazon is constantly getting large government [cloud] contracts. They use the profits from those large government contracts to subsidize their retail business. Then in their retail business they engage in predatory pricing against their third party vendors to try to wipe them out which is wrong.”

For the past two years, Buck was the top Republican on the powerful House antitrust subcommittee and has played a key role in forging a bipartisan agreement in Congress that would rein in Big Tech companies such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple for anti competitive activities.

Buck highlighted he is no longer the chair of the antitrust subcommittee and so cannot determine what Congress investigates although he hopes the new committee chairman Rep. Thomas Massie, R-KY., will work with him on these Big Tech issues he has spearheaded. 

Nevertheless, he would like to use his perch within the Republican party and his new book to place pressure on Amazon to change its behavior or at the least be more transparent with Congress about its actions, particularly around major government contracts.

Buck and Sen. Mike Lee, R-UT., in 2021 aggressively called on Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and the Acting Inspector General of the Department of Defense Sean O’Donnell to investigate whether Amazon violated antitrust or ethics laws by attempting to influence the procurement process for the JEDI contract for cloud computing services for the Defense Department.

Buck told FedScoop that although Amazon has not engaged sincerely with him regarding his investigation into JEDI and stonewalled his attempts to get answers he remains deeply concerned about Amazon’s unethical behavior around JEDI and wants to put pressure on them to open up regarding their conduct. 

“I can certainly send them another letter, but they’re not going to take it very seriously,” he said.

Instead, Buck said that he urges the Defense Department to continue investigating Amazon’s actions around the JEDI contact.

The Pentagon’s Inspector General (IG) in April 2020 published a long-anticipated  300-plus-page report on the JEDI procurement to probe potential conflicts of interest raised in the early stages of the acquisition process.

The probe ultimately found that personnel who evaluated proposals for the contract were not pressured by the Trump White House to award the deal to Microsoft over Amazon and that the use of a single-award contract was legal.

The Defense Department IG report has since received sustained criticism from Republicans including Buck and Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-IA., who called it “bureaucratic whitewashing” in a scathing letter to the DOD’s Inspector General in January 2022.

Buck has also referred Amazon’s anti competitive practices in the consumer realm to the Justice Department for a criminal investigation. 

Buck is pushing the DOJ to look into potentially criminal conduct by Amazon and its senior executives due to Amazon’s “pattern and practice” of misleading conduct that appeared designed to “influence, obstruct, or impede” the House antitrust subcommittee’s investigation into competition in digital markets.

“What the Department of Justice is doing hopefully will bear fruit,” Buck said.

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The numbers come from the BGOV200, an annual ranking of the top 200 federal contractors created by Bloomberg Government.

“While multiple-award contracting is expected to dominate spending for years to come, agencies are also leveraging new acquisition methods to buy goods and services more quickly and easily in ways they haven’t before,” the report states.

The OTA authority, which was expanded by the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act, allows agencies to sidestep the Federal Acquisition Regulation and work with innovative, small companies that don’t normally do business with the government.

“Four billion dollars technically isn’t a huge amount considering the government spends $560 billion annually,” Daniel Snyder, director of government contracts research at Bloomberg Government, told FedScoop. “But it does have a tremendous amount of importance in terms of scaling new prototypes.”

OTA awards are generally quite small, as they are intended to fund prototype projects in an iterative fashion.

“It gives the government a huge flexibility,” Snyder said.

DIU and beyond

The Department of Defense’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) is a notable user of OTAs. In spring 2018 the group launched an innovative acquisition training program called HACQer, which gives DOD acquisition officials a four-month immersion in DIU’s operating model. The program’s 2019 cohort began in April.

Some in government, however, have warned against the overuse of OTAs.

“I think that’s the biggest risk,” Soraya Correa, DHS chief procurement officer, said at an event in November 2018. “That people use them properly, that we don’t overuse them, that we don’t abuse them, so they are around for the long haul.”

The BGOV200 also lists the top performing IT contractors for 2018 — General Dynamics with $3 billion in obligations, Leidos Holdings Inc. with $2.4 billion and Perspecta with $2.2 billion head up that list. Per the report, tech services is the third largest category of spending after knowledge-based services and facility-related services. Tech spending also grew by $5 billion between fiscal 2017 and fiscal 2018 — the fourth straight year of an increase in this area.

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Rubio wrote a letter to national security adviser John Bolton saying he worries the single-award contract will “result in wasted taxpayer dollars and fail to provide our warfighters with the best technology solutions.” While Bolton doesn’t have direct authority over the DOD’s procurement processes, he is one of the president’s closest advisers.

The letter comes as protests to delay and change the JEDI process by Oracle appears to have failed. The competition for the contract is now down to just Amazon Web Services and Microsoft. Pentagon CIO Dana Deasy said recently the award for JEDI will likely come sometime in August.

Rubio’s letter echoes concerns of fellow Republican lawmakers and conservatives who have raised that JEDI’s single-award strategy and gate entry requirements were tailormade for AWS and limit market competition.

Rubio goes on to cite the DOD inspector general’s investigation of potential conflicts of interest surrounding the contract. He said he is “also writing to Acting [DOD] Secretary Esper about these conflicts of interest, and it is my hope the IG’s work will be taken seriously. “

The Florida senator also referenced the Intelligence Community’s move away from a single-cloud infrastructure as evidence of the superiority of a multi-cloud model. IC CIO John Sherman recently confirmed the Central Intelligence Agency plans to pursue a multi-cloud multi-vendor cloud system, but stressed their move was not a repudiation of the DODs cloud mission.

“We don’t believe it is appropriate …  to be used as a yardstick for JEDI as DOD and the intelligence community are at different places in our prospective cloud modernization journeys,” Sherman said.

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This is according to a new report by the agency’s inspector general that examined the agency’s Transformation Twenty-One Total Technology Next Generation (T4NG) contract and whether it is being run according to VA and federal acquisition regulations. While the investigation didn’t find any violations of law, it did find a number of “oversight weaknesses.”

These weaknesses “increase the likelihood of the VA conducting business with contractors who are unable to provide services in accordance with contract requirements” and “ultimately place IT systems and hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars at unnecessary risk and potentially negatively impact VA’s ability to meet its mission to care for veterans,” the report states.

While reviewing a sample of task orders awarded under T4NG, a multiple-award contract with 28 contractors attached, the inspector general found the “program office staff did not consistently follow procedures designed to ensure VA only pays for services performed according to contract requirements.”

The contracting officer’s representatives interviewed told the IG that they were consistently reviewing contract deliverables to make sure they are acceptable before authorizing invoices. However, the IG found itself unable to verify this, either because the review wasn’t documented or because the definition of “acceptable” wasn’t documented.

The report also found contracting officer’s representatives did not submit contractor performance assessments in a timely manner.

Given the value of the T4NG contract, the IG recommended that the VA work on strengthening its oversight. The contract, which began in 2016, is worth up to $22.3 billion over a period of five years, with an optional additional period of five years. As of December 2018, the agency had given out about $9.8 billion with an average task order size of approximately $29.4 million. “If controls are not strengthened, there is potential for significant loss to VA,” the report’s conclusion states.

Karen L. Brazell, the principal executive director of VA’s Office of Acquisition, Logistics, and Construction, said she was “encouraged” that the IG report didn’t find any violations of VA or federal acquisition regulations. That said, she agreed with the IG’s findings and recommendations and stated that the agency’s senior procurement executive will draft the necessary policies and procedures to address the issues raised in the report by October 2019.

This is not the first issue the VA has had with acquisitions. In March, the Government Accountability Office added VA acquisition management to its high-risk list.

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But Ryan Helbach, chief intrapreneur at the Air Force Research Laboratory, told FedScoop the event was more than just the sum of the contracts granted. “I’ve never been to an event like that that had so much energy,” he said in a recent interview.

The stats: After an application and selection process, a total 59 companies were invited to pitch 60 solutions. Of these, 26 companies had never received a Department of Defense contract before, representing “exactly” the kind of companies the Air Force was hoping to lure in with this SBIR-in-a-day opportunity, Helbach said.

In the end, the Air Force awarded 51 contracts, paying out up to $158,000 to each company on the spot. Helbach said this seemingly high success rate doesn’t surprise him, because the 59 companies invited to pitch had already been selected out of a group of around 400 applicants. “These were already the top of the crowd,” he said.

Of course, no experimental event can go off completely without a hitch, and the pitch day was no exception. The issue that made everyone most nervous? Purchase card fraud alerts.

“We were spending so much money with a credit card — we kinda jokingly said we were spending it in Times Square and what’s the Air Force doing and stuff,” Helbach said. Thankfully, there was a bank representative on hand to help resolve these issues. “We worked through it,” Helbach said. “We were able to pay all the companies there and then.”

Moving forward, the Air Force will track the progress of each contract recipient as they go through a five-month customer discovery sprint. Helbach expects they’ll then down-select again, moving only the most promising solutions into phase two of the SBIR process.

But he also says the Air Force, and perhaps other branches of the military, will host more pitch days in the future. “I look at this as this is an excellent tool that we’ve added to our tool kit for engaging with entrepreneurs and with startups and small businesses,” Helbach said. “You’ll be hearing more.”

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