We were looking at a shipbuilding bid recently, where they put out a tender but said “by the way, here's the company we're choosing”. They sole-sourced it, but for transparency they posted it and said, “Here's the company.” They explained that they had worked with the company in the past and no one else could do it. Even though it's the RAND Corporation, lots of large consulting firms could easily do it.
How much do you think this is costing taxpayers and small businesses, etc., when we're doing these processes where we're excluding so many other bidders based on the excuse that “we've worked with these guys before”?