Except that the old "Public Procurement" rules will kick-in, requiring that funding is awarded "fairly" across a number of applicants, regardless of capability or execution skills, Boeing and Blue Origin getting funding for orbital payload delivery being a prime recent example
Almost agree. These are, if I'm not mistaken, the individual States that are running the bidding. (Y'know, the individual states that have Sovereign Jurisdiction, unlike the US Federal Government, which doesn't.) Which means to a greater or lesser extent that they set their individual rules. The Feds and some of the States might have that fairness doctrine floating around, but I rather doubt that all of them, or even the majority, do.
For those of you outside the borders of the U.S.A.: Quite a few of the individual States were sovereign independent countries before the Federation of these states formed the larger country. As a result, the 10th Amendment (the last of the Bill of Rights to go into the Constitution) was enacted. Yes, this makes running the country rather, "interesting", but it more or less works.
Heh. One Day, some years back, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts decided that the State Government was going to use FOSS standards for all documentation. Spreadsheets, documents, etc. As some of you probably know, most Microsoft Office documents are based on standards that are, pretty much, "Whatever Microsoft decided in the last fifteen minutes." So, the Open Document Format in which everything actually
was laid out explicitly had a certain charm about it that the IT people in the State Government and their management liked.
When this hit the list of proposed rules Microsoft had a canary, of course, and sued. But most of their lawsuit were based upon some cock-a-mamie Federal Rules of Procurement; the Commonwealth was kind enough to point out to Microsoft's lawyers that the Commonwealth was, indeed, Sovereign, and didn't have to abide by those rules.
I don't remember who actually won that argument; but, nowadays, Microsoft Office has had the ability to save documents in ODF format, and the ODF format used is not, "Whatever Microsoft Says."
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