[sailfast]

For what it's worth (to the initial quotes posted) there are plenty of options in the FAR and on existing contract vehicles to hire people with particular sets of skills to achieve a general goal / purpose of the organization "and other duties" that will allow you to contract flexible skills that you can direct as needed.

To your last point - I agree there is a lot of red tape. This needs to improve but it's also there for protection.

At a minimum, updating the GS scale / hiring authorities to ensure that the right expertise can be hired at competitive rates to effectively manage and guide contractual expertise is a MUST.

Right now, program officers may not even have the expertise / in-house resources to understand whether the work being done / reported is going to achieve their contract objective, and they might be relying on contractor project managers to translate. (Sometimes from the same company!) so checks are hard to come by and it's all very inefficient. To do this effectively you have to be able to hire folks that know, to create a culture around the effort at the agency so they can bring contractors on as true partners that understand the way the agency does business (norms, engineering standards, reporting, etc) - this goes a long way to ensuring objectives are met and real work is getting done.