The Changing Federal Acquisition Landscape

Leaner RFPs. Mission-focused evaluation. Faster cycles. What it means for your next pursuit.

The federal acquisition environment is changing faster than most BD teams are adapting. Continuing resolutions have become the norm. Agencies are under pressure to do more with less. RFPs are getting leaner. Evaluation criteria are shifting toward mission impact over technical elegance. And timelines? They're compressing whether you're ready or not.

Most teams respond to this uncertainty by waiting. They watch. They hedge. They tell themselves they'll adjust when things stabilize.

That's backward.

The teams winning right now are building pursuit strategies that assume volatility. They're aligning capture plans to mission outcomes. They're treating budget uncertainty as a permanent condition.

Waiting for clarity is a losing position.

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What Shipley is seeing

Evaluators are prioritizing solutions that directly address mission needs over proposals that check compliance boxes. "Technically acceptable" is table stakes to them. The winners are the ones who demonstrate they understand why the agency needs this.

Leaner RFPs mean less guidance and more ambiguity. If you're waiting for the solicitation to tell you what to propose, you've already lost positioning to competitors who shaped their approach months earlier.

Faster cycles reward teams with pre-built content, pre-baked strategies, and rehearsed review processes. The old model of standing up a proposal team after RFP release is becoming a liability.

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What should you do about it?

Stop planning for stability. Build capture strategies that flex when priorities shift. Align your win themes to mission outcomes. Invest in customer engagement now, before the RFP drops, because the compressed timelines won't give you room to recover lost ground.

The landscape isn't going back to what it was. Are you ready to evolve or get left behind?

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