From the desk of board chair Arnold Punaro
NDIA Members –
I’d like to update you on all that NDIA has been doing vis-à-vis Executive Order 14042 regarding vaccine mandates for government contractors. Our Strategy & Policy team led by Wes Hallman has been heavily engaged on the topic with OUSD/A&S’s office of Defense Pricing and Contracting (DPC), the White House (OMB Management lead), and with our fellow like-minded associations. Our President and CEO, Gen. Hawk Carlisle, is also highly engaged at the highest levels and, with Wes and his team, is pushing hard on key decision-makers to get better answers and results for our industry.
We have participated in an industry association call with DPC and then two with OMB. During the call with DPC and in comments sent to OMB, we brought several concerns to the virtual table and hit multiple times on two of our key concerns for passing on to the White House. First is that the smaller a business is, the higher impact it will be to lose even a small number of employees. We’ve noted that in most cases, these are highly trained/educated individuals with unique skills and often with clearances. We’ve asked for flexibility (testing in lieu of vaccines, remote work, etc.) to be included in the policy along with clear, consistent guidance. Additionally, we noted that with any loss of personnel, there are going to be impacts on contract execution; so, we’ve asked for explicit guidance from contracting officers for equitable adjustments.
We have also passed on verbatim questions and concerns our membership has sent us for OMB to address. Attached is the tranche of inputs/questions we sent to OMB prior to the second call that happened on Tuesday of this week.
The overarching message coming out of these calls is that the administration is willing to take the risk of companies losing some employees. They believe from their data that there will be “noise up front and compliance in the back” as this directive is implemented (they continue to use the United Airlines case as an example of that where there are around 300 holdouts out of 67K employees). Also, their stated goal is the maximum number of Americans vaccinated, so they have given guidance to departments and agencies to broadly interpret and apply the mandate. Because we know your workforce is your most valuable asset and one that is not easily replaced, NDIA does not agree unnecessarily losing employees is an acceptable risk to our companies.
Regarding that, NDIA has received feedback from membership that the EO is being implemented unevenly across the Department of Defense (DoD) and that uncertainty remains regarding how much information/documentation companies will have to provide in their attestations that their covered workforce is vaccinated, criteria for exceptions (both religious and medical), what is meant by “products” based contracts and what that means to flow-down, and what, if any, indemnification will the government provide.
In a recent call with DoD, NDIA was informed that facility access guidance (and by extension, attestation requirements via the DD Form 3150) will likely be released today. Additionally, further DoD-wide guidance from the Office of the Deputy Secretary of Defense will be issued within the next week, and that the department is working as expeditiously as possible on implementing an FAR rule. All these are efforts to close the gaps in guidance and to standardize how contracts will be modified and enforced.
In order to help DoD in their efforts, Wes and his Director of Regulatory Policy, Nick Jones, are gathering information from you, our membership, on your experiences with their respective contracting officers, issues with religious and medical exemptions, and any other concerns/difficulties you are experiencing. They will consolidate and anonymize your inputs before sending them forward to DoD.
Additionally, we’ve been part of a large group of associations participating in our own calls without government reps to discuss common concerns and strategies.
Finally, besides these engagements, NDIA has started up an ad hoc working group on EO implementation to provide best practices to our membership and highlight continuing concerns. Our subgroups are broken into three broad areas:
Exceptions (Medical and Religious) and Accommodations
Flow down to subcontracts
Requests for Equitable Adjustment
Please contact either Wes or Nick if you would like to participate.
In the meantime, NDIA will stay engaged and pass on information as we get it.