The Procurement Trap

In November 2025, the Government of Guam scheduled a groundbreaking ceremony for the replacement of Simon Sanchez High School in Yigo. The Department of Public Works had awarded the reconstruction contract. A date was set: November 24. Then a losing bidder filed a procurement protest, and the automatic stay provision of Guam law froze everything — the contract, the demolition, the ceremony. The groundbreaking was cancelled. The students, nearly two thousand of them, remained on double sessions at John F. Kennedy High School, where they had been since portions of the Sanchez campus were shut down for safety reasons.¹

The first plan to rebuild Simon Sanchez was announced in 2013. The first request for proposals was issued in June 2015. A decade later, not a single shovel has broken ground.² The failures that produced this outcome are not mysteries, and the fixes are not theoretical — other jurisdictions have already built the systems that solve each one.

The Government of Guam procures goods, services, and construction through a system governed by 5 GCA Chapter 5 — the Guam Procurement Law — modeled on the American Bar Association's Model Procurement Code. On paper, the architecture is sound: centralized procurement through the General Services Agency, competitive sealed bidding as the preferred method, independent oversight through the Office of Public Accountability, and tiered thresholds that escalate procedural requirements with dollar value.³

The trouble is not the architecture. It is the execution — at nearly every stage.

The system operates in tiers: no competitive process required under five hundred dollars; three written quotations between five hundred and twenty-five thousand; full competitive sealed bidding above twenty-five thousand for supplies and services or one hundred thousand for construction, with public advertisement for a minimum of fifteen days; and Attorney General review for anything above five hundred thousand.⁴

At each threshold, a new set of procedural requirements activates. And at each threshold, the system introduces a new opportunity for delay.

The foundation is the people who run the process. Guam law mandates procurement training and certification through the Guam Community College. The OPA audited compliance in 2020 and found that most agencies had failed to complete it. Of all administrators, only one — the Superintendent of Education — held certification in all four modules. Even at GSA, only two individuals were fully certified.⁵

The consequences of this gap are not abstract. OPA Report No. 11-12, the most recent audit on the subject, found that GSA routinely used small purchase procedures for recurring items that, when aggregated, far exceeded the competitive bidding threshold — a practice known as order splitting. The audit identified $884,000 in questioned costs. It also found that the Department of Administration's legacy AS 400 financial system could not identify or prevent purchases exceeding the small purchase threshold. That audit was published in 2011. No subsequent report has documented that the system has been replaced or the practice corrected.⁶

At the other end of the spectrum, the statutory requirement that the Attorney General review and approve all contracts exceeding five hundred thousand dollars introduces oversight that, in practice, operates without a deadline. In 2016, when DPW invoked a provision of law to proceed with Simon Sanchez despite a pending protest, the AG refused to concur and the project stopped.⁷ In the current round, the AG has concurred — but that is precisely the point. Whether a hundred-million-dollar school moves forward should not hinge on the disposition of whichever attorney general happens to hold office.⁸

But the most consequential structural defect in Guam's procurement system is the automatic stay.

Under 5 GCA § 5425, any timely protest automatically freezes the solicitation, the contract award, and all project performance — until every level of appeal is exhausted. No bond is required. No showing of merit or irreparable harm is necessary. The filing alone halts a project indefinitely, through an appeal chain running from the Chief Procurement Officer to the OPA, the Superior Court, and the Supreme Court of Guam.^{9 10}

Senator Will Parkinson, citing the Simon Sanchez debacle, has introduced legislation that would eliminate the automatic stay and require protesters to file a separate motion supported by sworn evidence, post a bond equal to two percent of the contract value or five thousand dollars (whichever is greater), and demonstrate a strong likelihood of success. Frivolous protests would result in forfeiture of the bond.¹¹

The reform is overdue. But it must be balanced against the legitimate function of the protest mechanism. A RAND study commissioned by Congress found that less than 0.3% of federal contracts are protested, and the GAO has warned that overly punitive measures could reduce competition and drive up costs.¹²

The answer is not to eliminate the right of protest. It is to ensure that the right is exercised responsibly, with consequences for abuse and protections for the public interest.

There is a broader question embedded in the Simon Sanchez story, and in the procurement failures that the OPA has documented across agencies for more than a decade: Why does Guam's procurement system still run on procedures designed for an era of paper requisitions and fax machines?

Other jurisdictions have answered this question decisively.

South Korea launched the Korea ON-line E-Procurement System, known as KONEPS, in 2002. It digitized the entire procurement cycle — from bid notices through contracting and payment — into a single platform serving more than 37,000 public organizations. A business registers once and can bid on any contract in the system. Bid results are disclosed in real time. The system interconnects data across 156 organizations, eliminating redundant paperwork and enabling automated compliance checks. The United Nations awarded the system its Public Service Award in 2003; the OECD praised its effectiveness in a 2016 peer review; and the World Bank has identified KONEPS as a model for Pacific Island Countries.¹³

The results are not theoretical. KONEPS generated cumulative cost savings estimated at $6 billion USD over its first decade. Procurement transparency scores improved by twenty percent. Small and medium enterprises — 96.9% of registered businesses on the platform — gained access to public contracts that had previously been dominated by larger, better-connected firms.¹⁴

The federal government offers a complementary lesson. Approximately 56% of Department of Defense contract dollars now flow through Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity contracts — multiple-award umbrella agreements under which several pre-approved vendors compete for individual task orders as needs arise, without a full solicitation each time. FEMA used IDIQ contracts to mobilize disaster response after Hurricane Katrina in days rather than months.¹⁵ The key safeguard is that the vendor pool must be refreshed periodically and open to new entrants — on an island with a small business community, any mechanism that locks in incumbents and locks out capable newcomers would defeat the purpose of competition.

Guam does not need to buy an enterprise procurement platform designed for jurisdictions fifty times its size. AI-assisted development now allows small teams to design and deploy custom systems in months rather than years — systems tailored to Guam's procurement law, integrated with its business licensing data, and scaled to the approximately sixty agencies and few thousand vendors that constitute the island's procurement ecosystem. KONEPS was built by Samsung SDS for a nation of fifty million. A system for Guam would be orders of magnitude simpler, and the tools to build it are more capable than at any point in the history of software engineering.

What Guam needs is a procurement system that does four things it currently does not do.

First, it needs to digitize the entire procurement cycle — not just the advertisement of solicitations, which OpenGovGuam.com already handles, but the requisitioning, evaluation, award, and payment processes that still run on paper and a legacy financial system. A well-designed system does more than accelerate the process; it absorbs the training deficit that OPA has flagged for over a decade. When the platform enforces thresholds, prevents order splitting, routes approvals to the correct authority, and requires mandatory disclosures before a solicitation can proceed, compliance becomes structural rather than dependent on whether an individual officer completed certification. Professional judgment — writing a sound scope of work, evaluating proposals — still requires development. But the procedural errors that have generated hundreds of thousands in questioned costs are precisely the kind a properly built system eliminates by design. Beyond enforcement, digitization opens a second front: competition. A vendor registry linked to business licensing, where every licensed business registers its capabilities, would ensure that when an agency issues a solicitation, the system notifies every qualified vendor directly — not through passive newspaper advertisements that capable firms may never see. This is how KONEPS operates: register once, and the system matches opportunities to capabilities.¹⁶

Second, for recurring needs — IT services, facilities maintenance, professional consulting — the government should establish multiple-award indefinite delivery contracts that allow agencies to issue task orders against pre-negotiated terms, with periodic open enrollment so that new and growing businesses can compete their way in.

Third, the Legislature should impose a statutory deadline — thirty or forty-five days — on the Attorney General's review of procurements exceeding five hundred thousand dollars, with deemed approval if no response is issued. Oversight without a deadline is not oversight. It is a veto by silence.

Fourth, it needs to reform the automatic stay so that the right of protest is preserved but cannot be weaponized to delay critical public projects for years without any showing of merit.

The Procurement Policy Office, housed in the Office of the Governor, has the statutory authority to set procurement policy for the entire government. The Legislature has the authority to reform both the automatic stay and the AG review process. Neither requires federal permission or new revenue. Both require a decision that the cost of inaction has become unacceptable.

Nearly two thousand students at Simon Sanchez High School are waiting. They have been waiting for more than a decade. The procurement system that is supposed to serve them has instead become the reason they attend school in double sessions, in a facility that was not built for them, studying under conditions that their own school district has not assessed for impact on learning outcomes.¹⁷ The law meant to protect the integrity of public spending has become the instrument of its paralysis.

The fix is not complicated. It is, however, overdue.

Disclosure: The author is a technology executive and consultant on Guam whose firm could be a potential vendor for government technology modernization. His interest in procurement began with background research into Guam's contracting processes. A subsequent conversation with Peter J. Santos, a candidate for attorney general and a proponent of procurement reform, deepened that interest and led to the analysis presented here. The research and conclusions are entirely the author's own. He has no contract with or financial relationship with any government agency or political candidate referenced in this article.