[mikeweiland]

I couldn't agree more. The GWAC / IDIQ referenced above attempts to do both (increase competition with pre-qualified companies and limit the number of primes that have access) but in the end it's still a limiter to competition.

This all said, there some valid reasons to limit. For example, if the Department of Education wants to buy 1000 laptops and there were 5,000 responses to the opp there is a significant lift/cost for reviewing and responding to each of these. What is more cumbersome for the government is when one of the 'losers' protests the award. This halts the delivery of the computers to the customer as it goes through a 3rd party (still gov) review. In the end, the original awardee generally gets the ability to sell the computers but by this time they are now 18-24 months old... This is a complicated system governed by a few thousand pages of rules called the FAR (federal acquisition regulations).

[clairity]

i'd wager you wouldn't have 5000 potential vendors once effective competition and smaller deal sizes squeezes out excess profit/graft. but from my experience with state procurement processes, the initial weed-out phase seems highly automatable, leaving a much more manageable fraction of candidates to consider manually.

also, transparency rules should be rigorous enough to illuminate all ultimate beneficiaries (through shell companies and subcontractors) so that larry, his brother darryl, and his other brother darryl can't artificially muddy competitiveness and undermine fairness.