Good point. The additional problem here seems to be people underbidding significantly (obviously $1 is an extreme), and there's no way for 18F to determine qual

Good point. The additional problem here seems to be people underbidding significantly (obviously $1 is an extreme), and there's no way for 18F to determine quality. While waiting 10 days doesn't seem like a huge problem, the overhead of iterating through contractors could become huge, especially on time-sensitive tasks. One solution would be to charge each bidder (at the time of the contract, if they're the lowest) a 'down payment' to be involved - where the down payment might be some function of their bid and the next highest bid.