Construction

Many contractors are familiar with the Davis-Bacon Act (“DBA”), the statute that requires government contractors to pay prevailing wages to workers employed in the construction, alteration, or repair of buildings or other public works.  The DBA is enforced by the Department of Labor, which is responsible for issuing the “wage determinations” that list the prevailing wages for different labor categories within a geographical area and for promulgating regulations used to implement the DBA’s requirements.

On March 18, 2022, the Department issued a notice of proposed rulemaking (“NPRM”), announcing that it intends to make a number of revisions to the DBA regulations.  In the Department’s view, these revisions represent the largest change to the DBA regulations since the last major rewrite in 1981.Continue Reading Department of Labor Proposes Overhaul to Davis-Bacon Act Regulations

Last week, President Trump issued a new executive order, entitled “Strengthening Buy-American Preferences for Infrastructure Projects.”  This order serves as an extension of the President’s earlier April 2017 “Buy American and Hire American” executive order, which we have previously analyzed in this space.  The April 2017 order stated that “it shall be the policy of the executive branch to buy American and hire American,” and, among other things, directed agencies to “scrupulously, monitor, enforce, and comply with” domestic preference laws (referred to by the executive order as “Buy American Laws”) and to minimize use of waivers that would permit the purchase of foreign end products.

The President’s new order continues to emphasize the importance of “the use of goods, products, and materials produced in the United States,” but is specifically directed towards infrastructure projects that are recipients of federal financial assistance awards.  As we have reported previously, federally-financed infrastructure has also been a stated area of focus for the Trump administration, although the Administration’s “Legislative Outline for Rebuilding Infrastructure in America” released last year curiously lacked any domestic preference requirements.

The new executive order makes up for this previous omission and then some:  it has the potential to affect a vast number of programs and projects, and may in fact impose domestic sourcing requirements in areas—such as internet infrastructure—that are not typically targets for domestic preferences.Continue Reading Trump’s New Executive Order Requires Additional Buy American Preferences For Infrastructure Projects

Last week, the GSA Office of Inspector General (“OIG”) released a Report explaining how GSA decided to abandon previous plans to build a new suburban campus for the FBI, and instead demolish and then rebuild the J. Edgar Hoover (“JEH”) building in Washington, D.C.  Although much of the coverage of the Report has focused on the role of the White House in the decision-making process and the GSA Administrator’s failure to acknowledge that role in testimony before Congress, the Report also highlights the Office of Management and Budget’s (“OMB”) strict approach to the budget scoring rules found in OMB Circular A-11, Appendices A and B.
Continue Reading OIG Report Chronicles Recent Attempts To Construct FBI Headquarters Through Public-Private Partnership, Highlights Proposed Use of Federal Capital Revolving Fund