A draft RFP is your chance to improve the requirement

A useful response to a government draft RFP identifies a problem in the proposed requirement, explains its effect on delivery or competition, and offers a practical change. Start with the notice and draft documents in your G2X research. Bring in the people who would deliver the work, then send a focused response through the buyer's stated feedback process.

That work can be worth doing well before your team is ready to commit to a proposal. A draft may leave an important operating assumption unresolved: when the contractor gets access to facilities, which systems must keep running during transition, or what evidence the government will accept for a proposed method. Those details affect the team you need and the price you can defend.

With FY2027 beginning on October 1, the useful early opportunity is a requirement your business understands well enough to improve. A date on a forecast alone will not tell you when that conversation is possible. The actual notice, its attachments and the stated comment window will.

Read it with the person who would own delivery

Begin with G2X federal opportunity research, then follow the original notice to establish what the agency is asking industry to review. A draft RFP may be posted with questions, a response template or only selected sections. Work within that invitation. Our sources-sought article covers the earlier decision to respond to market research; a draft RFP gives you more specific proposed terms to examine.

Ask your delivery lead to read the requirement alongside the proposed schedule and evaluation approach. Where does a bidder have to make an assumption? Would different interpretations produce materially different staffing plans? Is the government asking for proof of a result while describing an evaluation method that rewards something else?

For a hypothetical IT support procurement, suppose transition must finish within 30 days, but the draft does not say when the incoming team can obtain system access. A useful comment identifies the affected paragraph, describes which transition activities depend on access, and asks the agency to define that starting point. It might propose a sequence of government and contractor responsibilities. The buyer now has something specific to evaluate.

Explain the consequence and offer a change

Federal guidance recognizes early exchanges as a way to address feasibility, schedules, proposal instructions and evaluation criteria. FAR 15.201 includes draft RFPs among the methods for doing so. GSA's Part 15 overhaul guidance also expressly addresses draft RFPs under early industry exchanges. Use the instructions and applicable agency provisions in the actual procurement when preparing a response.

Your comment should make the buyer's decision easier. Name the section, describe the consequence, and suggest wording or a question the government can resolve. If you argue that a required credential unnecessarily narrows competition, explain what alternative evidence would establish the same capability. If you propose a longer transition, explain the dependencies behind it. Avoid claiming that the whole market shares your constraint unless you can support that claim.

A short response with a few well-supported changes can be more useful than a long inventory of preferences. Keep a separate internal record of what each issue means for your own pursuit. A buyer's decision to retain a requirement may tell you to find a teammate, change your approach or stop investing.

Use Lumen to organize the reading

You can upload authorized draft documents to G2X Lumen and ask it to connect requirements with their schedules and evaluation language. Give it a focused job: identify unresolved dependencies, cite the passages, and prepare candidate comments for your delivery lead to review. The Lumen context guide explains how to choose the documents it uses.

The technical reviewer still needs to supply the operating facts. Lumen cannot establish how quickly your personnel will receive access or promise that the agency will adopt a suggestion. Keep proprietary methods and internal pricing out of a public comment unless your company has approved their disclosure.

Manual opportunity research is available through G2X Community Edition; Lumen is a separate AI capability. The useful output in either case is a response your team is willing to stand behind, followed by a reminder to read the final RFP. Compare that final language with the concerns you raised before carrying any draft-stage assumptions into the proposal.