Alan Grayson: “I want to make it clear that within the literal wording of this amendment no agency is ever required to choose the…”

“I want to make it clear that within the literal wording of this amendment no agency is ever required to choose the least-cost product. All that this amendment says is that in the evaluation scheme, in order to encourage people who are offerers to think about how to save money for DOD, we make the commitment in general, overall, that cost or price will be considered at least as much as all the other factors combined. In addition to that, we allow the head of the agency to suspend the rule at will, without any condition or limitation in the statute. The head of the agency can determine that for any item, including mission-critical items, cost or price can be 40 percent, 30 percent, 10 percent, even 5 percent of the evaluation factors. So I think that although the gentleman's point is well taken, that we should not ever bind the hands of the DOD when DOD needs to get items that may not be the low cost item, this is an amendment that does not do that. This amendment simply says that, in general, under ordinary circumstances, particularly in buying volume commodities that are identical to each other, we should in fact make 50 percent of the consideration cost or price.”