The U.S. Federal Procurement System: An Introduction

This article provides a modest introduction to U.S. procurement law, especially federal procurement law, which generally is more extensively developed than state or local procurement law, and suggests possible lessons learned that may be useful for other systems. This article is divided in seven parts and its analysis encompasses the history, which has endowed the system with its current characteristics, market access and potential entry barriers, the main procurement methods in the federal system, the principal types of contracts, the bid protests system for aggrieved bidders, and the anticorruption mechanisms of the US system. All these elements act as pieces of an apparatus that, without being perfect, has evolved over the years to become a public procurement regime that is both complex and mature.