The drag works on both sides too. While in Air Force acquisition in the 90s, Congress passed a law that all contracts had to have a provision that banned use of fluorocarbons in producing things for the military. We could not sign another contract extension or do anything else until this provision was implemented, which of course generated all the usual overhead of adding another requirement to the contract. (Negotiating position was “Sign this or else.” )

This affected the contract I was managing and potentially put the contractor in a bind, because we were just about to sign an extension to keep him at work, but suddenly we had about two days to crank through this additional provision on top of all the other stuff going on. This included having the contract generate paper to certify he was not using fluorocarbons to produce his product. We got it done but it required a lot of unneeded “hurry up” and extra paper work on both sides.

Oh, the contractor’s product that we were buying? Software. Lines of code.

The law did not allow distinguishing between contracts that produced material objects that might use various chemicals and simply writing lines of code, reports, and such.

A small example, but it was a lot of grit in the wheels that makes the government contracting process so frustrating and expensive.