[ih] misc questions about 1970s/1980s contracts and funding

[touch at strayalpha.com]

Some other points worth noting, mostly from experience (so YMMV):

- putting multiple tasks under one contract is quite common
	- sometimes because that’s how the contract was intended (a ‘blanket’ that included options for future work)
	- sometimes because it’s expedient to add-on an existing contract rather than spin up a new one (contracts take quite a long time to setup)

- as is putting one project under multiple tasks, sometimes from multiple agencies
	- that’s how 10-year projects are supported with 2-3 yr grants/contracts

Note also the difference between a grant and a contract, and different kinds of contracts (firm fixed price, cost reimbursement, etc).
	- grants have reports, but are not typically contingent on deliverables
	- some contracts can be extended in only limited ways
		e.g., DARPA contracts to universities often must follow the RFP (BAA) posting ’split’; 
		if a BAA asks for proposals with a 2-year base and 2 possibly concurrent option followons, 
		then that’s all DARPA can do. They can’t turn around and say “oh, I really want this option of A and that option of B but neither base”
		i.e., as they say in the restaurant business, “no substitutions, only omissions as indicated”

i.e., that’s a lot of the reason why research contracts might not have public proposals available; the proposal is often more like a reason to give the contract/grant, but the *actual* contract/grant is often much less interesting than expected. In many contracts, only the actual statement of work, list of deliverables, and agreements (e.g., copyright, patent rights, data rites, data escrow) are the thing that you might end up seeing.

There are some websites with “gov contracts overviews”, FWIW.

Joe

—
Joe Touch, temporal epistemologist
www.strayalpha.com