- procurement
A request for proposals is a public solicitation that asks firms for a complete, scoped, and priced offer to do the work. Unlike a pure low-bid invitation, an RFP is scored on stated criteria — technical approach, schedule, team, and price together — so the agency can select the best value rather than merely the cheapest number.
For the platform, an RFP and the proposals it draws are a rich seam of the public record: they lay out how a project was defined, who competed, and what each offered. An RFP typically follows a request for qualifications when an agency first shortlists on competence and then seeks priced proposals from the shortlist, and its figures can be read against the design-phase opinion of probable cost to see how bid reality tracked the engineer's estimate.