GUEST COLUMN.

Rethinking something foundational creates its own special energy, and right now that energy is running through public procurement law. For the first time since 2000, the Model Procurement Code (MPC) is undergoing a deep and comprehensive revision. I’ve spent the last year of this project elbow-deep in redlines, subcommittee memos and drafting calls with volunteers from across the country, and I’m confident that this effort has the potential to make a powerful and positive improvement in this critical discipline.

The MPC provides the baseline legal language for how public money turns into public value in jurisdictions ranging from small municipalities to entire state governments, and the central tension running through every drafting conversation is the same one procurement law has wrestled with for decades: How do we both protect public money from being mismanaged and still allow public servants to use their expertise to buy the things that government needs to function quickly and economically? 

Partners for Public Good is leading the effort to revise the Code in partnership with the American Bar Association’s Public Contract Law Section and the National Association of State Procurement Officials (NASPO). More than 100 volunteer procurement practitioners, attorneys, academics, and other associated government experts have organized themselves into committees spanning ethics, specifications, infrastructure, legal remedies, and a cross-cutting look at IT procurement. It's a necessarily big tent.

The Ethics Article, Article 12, just crossed a real milestone. After over a year of work from a drafting committee that produced a fully consolidated redline, the revision became open for public comment on August 20 on the project website at www.modelprocurementcode.com.

This is very exciting to me because it’s a transition from the internal and starts being a conversation with the field. Procurement officers, government ethics experts, and anyone with a stake in how public integrity rules function day to day now have a direct channel to weigh in before the language is finalized. If you work in or around public procurement, this is your invitation. The provisions touch everything from conflicts of interest to contemporaneous employment.

One of the most interesting threads across the drafting committees is a shared instinct toward flexibility. For example, the construction drafting committee, looking at Article 5 of the MPC, which deals with infrastructure, is rethinking how delivery method, source selection method, and contract type function, not as one bundled decision, but as three separate calls that each deserve their own rationale. That framing gives project teams room to structure complexity sensibly instead of forcing a one-size-fits-all lookup table.

The same spirit shows up in the IT-focused committee, which is developing new commentary spelling out how much room exists inside the competitive sealed proposal method. Phased and iterative proposals, demonstrations, prototypes, limited-scope pilots and sandbox testing, challenge-based solicitations that define the problem and let vendors compete on the solution--none of these need a new procurement method.

It's already there in the existing framework; it just hasn't been written down where a busy procurement officer or an unfamiliar vendor can find it. For technology buys especially, where the best approach often only becomes clear through use, that kind of plain-language commentary can be a genuine unlock. All the while, fair treatment, disclosure, and documentation stay as central as ever. 

A genuinely new discussion is how the MPC should address artificial intelligence in the procurement process. That's obviously new territory since the code was last revised in the early aughts, and the committees working on it are moving carefully. However, the intention is to give procurement professionals workable guidance now, rather than waiting for the technology to settle and leaving a vacuum in the meantime.

Maybe the most structurally ambitious piece of the whole project so far is what's happening upstream of source selection. Drafters are proposing wholly new regulatory frameworks for pre-acquisition activities, giving market research and planning defined terms and a required place on the timeline, instead of leaving them as good practice nobody ever wrote down.

Under the emerging structure, agencies would document their planning and certify it before a solicitation goes out, scaled to the size and complexity of the buy. The companion piece is permission to talk to the market first, with research aimed at finding capable businesses, plus permitting other information-gathering activities like industry days, RFIs, draft RFPs, and one-on-one conversations with potential offerors, all before requirements are locked in. The bet is that the earlier information flows in both directions, the better every downstream procurement turns out.

None of this is finished. The whole point of opening Article 12 for comment, and of the dozens of drafting conversations happening in parallel, is to get this right before it's locked in. But 47 years is a long time between comprehensive revisions, and the shape of what's coming next feels genuinely built for the world procurement professionals work in today.

 If you’ve got expertise in procurement law and you’d like to join our passionate group of volunteer drafters, please get in touch at inquiries@partnersforpublicgood.org. I’d love to hear from you.

The contents of this Guest Column are those of the author, and not necessarily Barrett and Greene, Inc

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