[Frondo]

Another way to do this involves a shift from lowest-cost purchasing to best-value purchasing. Under lowest cost guidelines, the agency cannot take any factors but price into consideration, leading to this garbage. With best-value, they can look at the contractor's past performance in making a determination. Slowly, agencies are making the change, but a lot of them are still required by guidelines to go with the lowest bid.

[my123]

Best value is hard to evaluate objectively, which is one of the reasons why this mess even happened.

And corruption can affect it evaluating the value too

[Frondo]

It's true that best value can be gamed, but any system can be gamed.

When buyers can define some evaluation criteria like reviewing the bidder's past performance (delivery on-time vs late, cost overruns) in addition to current bid, they can better assess how smoothly this project will go, and past performance is difficult to game without lying, i.e. submitting a fraudulent bid package.

The procurement field has a number of membership organizations and certifications and these people are largely good and ethical workers who take pride in doing good for their employers. Not all, but the good ones far outnumber the lazy, incompetent, and corrupt. (I'm not one, but worked adjacent to the field for a while, and I think buyers often don't get a fair shake, because the corruption can be shocking when it's visible.)