And to a larger point, can anyone elaborate on whether what I've heard is true? Has litigation or sunlight through advocacy against the government worked in those cases?
This happens any time any government entity goes through the RFP>RFQ> process; local schools, city government, municipal water departments, state agencies, the FBI, etc
I onced snipped an almost million dollar deal at the department of justice. HP tape guys thought they had the deal zipped up as the spec called for only equipment they could provide.
Well they forgot[1] that they oem'ed all their tape hardware and software to the company I worked for and we had no non compete clause in our contract with them. I found the deal on FedBid, under bid them by like 70K with their own hardware that matched the spec 100%, won the deal and took the rest of the month off.
Dont even get me started on the dirty tricks that can be done around deal registration. Enterprise IT sales more shady than a used car lot.
[1] So they didnt forget as much as the fact that HP Gov sales is an entirely different division than the OEM team with essentially no communication between the two.
I learned about this working on election integrity.
After spending years learning the laws, rules, regulations, principles, policy, tech stack... it really just came down to who's getting paid.
I don't know how to mitigate this. More eyeballs?
Regulation isn't sufficient and susceptible to capture.
Sunshine laws aren't sufficient. FOIA is a step forward, but you're always two steps behind (don't even know what questions to ask).
Whistleblowers are routinely stomped, so less likely to speak up over time.
Few can afford to do investigative journalism any more.
So I was big fan of Obama's data.gov initiative. Publish all (non-sensitive) data by default. Calendars (hearings), procurement process, contracts, appropriations.
Wishful thinking?
The usual term for this is "single-sourcing", and it applies to much more than vendor selection in RFPs. You can single-source materials, vendors, locations, or anything else, and it's routinely done in legislation.
When a specification is written specifically for a single vendor, it's not called single-source; although the end-user probably advocated for single-source during negotiations with the procurement department. Not surprisingly, this is a constant source of friction for procurement departments. End-users almost always want to buy their preferred solution, and especially in IT. There are often good reasons, but I digress.
In some contexts, the single-source procurement strategy is simply not available; usually due to procurement law. This is when you most commonly see manipulation of specification. However, competing vendors can challenge the procurement in court through a procedure usually called a "bid protest". That's not exactly what's happening here, but it's similar.
1: The person who will ultimately use/implement the purchased goods/services.
2: Usually a separate department responsible for ensuring that goods/services are "responsibly" procured.
...this isn't accurate. Intentionally writing a specification that only one party can meet is in fact called single-sourcing.