Procurement isn’t your bottleneck. Your reflex about procurement is.
The RFP Reflex Is Killing Projects You Already Funded
Watch what happens to a small engagement. A $35k pilot that should start next week becomes a competitive solicitation that starts next fiscal year — if it survives the budget cycle. By the time the award lands, the requirement has drifted, the champion has moved on, and the momentum is dead. Nobody decided to kill the project. The process did it on autopilot.
The frustrating part: for a lot of focused IT work, that solicitation was never required.
What Direct Buy Actually Lets You Do
Washington’s Direct Buy authority (DES policy DES-125-03, under RCW 39.26.125(3)) lets agencies operating under delegated authority buy goods and services without a competitive solicitation, up to set thresholds. The structure is three tiers:
- Level 1 — under $40,000: any qualified vendor, no competitive solicitation.
- Level 2 — under $50,000: when the vendor is a Washington small business (RCW 39.26.010(22)) or a certified veteran-owned business (RCW 43.60A.010(7)).
- Level 3 — up to $100,000: when you invite quotes from at least three Washington small and/or veteran-owned businesses and meet the documentation and reporting requirements.
No WEBS advertising required. No protest process. The small-business and veteran-owned tiers aren’t a courtesy — they’re the rule rewarding you for hitting the supplier-diversity targets you already carry. A qualifying small business on the other side of the table raises your no-solicitation ceiling and opens the $100k lane.
The Catch You Don’t Get to Skip
Direct Buy skips the solicitation. It does not skip OCIO Policy #121. Every IT-related procurement — regardless of dollar amount — carries security and liability impact, and it still needs OCIO coordination and the approvals that come with it. Direct Buy gets you to a signed contract fast; #121 governance is exactly as real as it was before. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling you an audit finding.
The play isn’t dodging oversight. It’s not manufacturing oversight you don’t owe.
Two more rules worth internalizing: use existing master or approved cooperative contracts where they fit, and never split a $90k project into three $30k purchase orders to slide under a threshold. Bundling-to-evade is the one thing the policy explicitly prohibits, and repetitive same-type purchases aggregate across the fiscal year. It’s also the first pattern an audit flags.
Where This Lands for Real Work
Most scoped engineering engagements live comfortably inside these thresholds. A citation-bound Copilot Studio agent for a policy or personnel knowledge base. A Power Automate workflow that reclaims unused M365 licenses through contextual inference. A statutory-retention records-classification build using a local model and embeddings. These are weeks of focused work, not multi-year integrator contracts — and they fit a Direct Buy. You can have an engineer scoping the actual problem in the time it would’ve taken to draft the evaluation criteria for the RFP.
Who’s on the Other End
Puget Sound AI is a veteran-owned small business out of Puyallup — SAM-active, NAICS 541512 / 611420, VOSB with certification in progress. Solo by design: the person who scopes the work is the person who builds it and the person who documents it for your staff. No account manager, no bench to keep billable, no slide deck I’ll invoice you for. Solutions are architected to operate inside Microsoft’s FedRAMP-authorized GCC (Government Community Cloud) boundary and aligned to CMMC / NIST 800-171 control objectives. Governed and audit-ready, moving at the speed of the problem instead of the speed of the procurement queue.
If you’ve got a project sitting in the RFP queue that could have shipped last quarter, let’s talk.