government spending | The Contracting Education Academy

August 13, 2020 By cs

Annual government spending approaches historic territory

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic forced the federal government into emergency spending mode, agencies — including the Defense Department — were on pace to blow past the single-year contract spending record of $598 billion set in fiscal 2019.

As of Aug. 5, the federal government has obligated $438 billion in spending, with agencies expected to unload almost $200 billion more before the close of the 2020 fiscal year on Sept. 30, according to a Bloomberg Government analysis. The government typically spends about one-third of all money appropriated by Congress in its fourth quarter — July, August and September — since most money unspent is returned to the Treasury.

“We’ve been saying at the end of fiscal 2020, total government spending is likely to be around $630 billion,” Daniel Synder, director of government contracts analysis at Bloomberg Government, told Nextgov. “That was before we factored anything related to the CARES Act or COVID-19 spending.”

Synder said the $2 trillion stimulus package passed in March could add another $10 billion to $20 billion to the government’s total discretionary spending in fiscal 2020 — much of it on networking capacity, bandwidth and telework services — which would put the government’s total discretionary spending to $650 billion or more.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2020/08/annual-government-spending-approaches-historic-territory/167474/

July 20, 2020 By cs

Agencies expected to spend almost $200 billion on acquisition in FY20’s fourth quarter

The fourth quarter spending surge is upon us, and it appears the federal acquisition community isn’t just focused on getting money out the door, but request for proposals, too.

Agencies are expected to spend $194 billion between now and Sept. 30, according to Bloomberg Government. Departments will spend a big chunk of that total on technology — $28 billion — and on professional services — $32 billion.

But this has been a trend for some time.

“The $182 billion in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2019 spending obligations is about a $7 billion decrease from 2018, but fiscal 2019 represents about a $30 billion increase since 2016,” BGov said in a recent webinar. “Spending in the last month of the fiscal year is usually more than that of July and August combined.”

Of that $194 billion expected to go out the door in Q4 2020, BGov estimates that agencies will spend $101 billion in September, the most in one month since 2018 when they spent $99 billion.

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/reporters-notebook-jason-miller/2020/07/agencies-expected-to-spend-almost-200b-on-acquisition-in-q4-2020/

June 4, 2020 By cs

Federal procurement spending up $120 billion since 2015

Agencies spent more on procurement in fiscal 2019 than in any of the previous 10 years.

**Click on graphic above to see full GAO infographic.**

And no surprise, agency pending on multiple award contracts for IT and services spiked last year.

Now that all of the 2019 numbers are final, the predictions of a banner year for contractors and agencies when it came to buying products and services came true.

The Government Accountability Office found agencies spent $584 billion on procurement last year, up $20 billion over 2018 and more than $120 billion since 2015.

Bloomberg Government reported that agencies spent $448 billion on procurement in 2014 and a six-year low of $442 billion in 2015.

The Defense Department accounted for $381 billion while civilian agencies spent $205 billion.

Of that, GAO said agencies procured 83.5% of all contracts competitively, up from 64.4% in 2015. DoD continues to struggle with competition as GAO found the Pentagon’s rate dropped to 53.8% in 2019 from 55.4% in 2015.

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/reporters-notebook-jason-miller/2020/06/federal-procurement-spending-up-120b-since-2015/

October 28, 2019 By cs

How ‘night court’ will impact the Pentagon’s acquisition office

When U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper launched a review this summer of the departmentwide offices known as the “fourth estate,” he made it clear that everything, including cuts to programs and personnel, were on the table.

Two months into that review, clear themes have emerged, according to Pentagon acquisition head Ellen Lord: Esper isn’t looking to cut just to cut, and if offices aren’t tied directly into war-fighting needs, they may no longer belong in the Department of Defense.

Speaking on a panel at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference last Monday, Lord said several of her offices, including the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and the Defense Acquisition University, have gone through the review process.

“What we’ve seen there is more, perhaps, a pushing back of certain functions to either services or to intel,” Lord said. “Where I’ve seen a question of actually cutting the workforce is non-true DoD missions. As we’ve gone through a lot of the different areas, if it isn’t war fighting, if it’s something that one of the other agencies or the other departments across government has asked us to do, or if it’s something that should be a function of another department because it’s not about lethality, it will get cut.”

Keep reading this article at: https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/ausa/2019/10/15/how-night-court-will-impact-the-pentagons-acquisition-office

June 4, 2019 By AMK

Can contracts be awarded without pricing?

Since the enactment of the Competition in Contracting Act in 1984, price has been an essential element of every contract awarded by the Federal Government under the Federal Acquisition Regulation, along with technical capability and (more recently) past performance. In addition, before making an award, every contracting officer must determine that the price offered by the winning offeror(s) is “fair and reasonable.”

Agencies have wide discretion in establishing the value of the factors and subfactors under each of these three elements, and frequently price is identified as the least important of the factors to be evaluated.

But what if the price on a solicitation was not a factor to be evaluated at all? As part of the Professional Services Council’s long-standing acquisition reform advocacy agenda, we supported just such an experiment and it is now in effect for some agencies.

In Section 825 of the Fiscal Year 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), Congress provided that, for multiple-award indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (ID/IQ) contracts, DoD, NASA and Coast Guard buying activities are not required to evaluate cost or price during the evaluation of the formation of the ID/IQ contract, provided other conditions are met. If cost or price is not evaluated at formation, however, cost or price must be an evaluation factor in conjunction with the issuance of any task or delivery order under such awarded contract. The Professional Services Council strongly supported that legislative proposal.

What all of these ID/IQ solicitations and resulting contracts have in common is that there is actually no work associated with the formation of the base contract. All of the actual work is solicited under task or delivery orders issued once the base contract is in place. As such, we argued that agencies were creating irrelevant price evaluation factors in order to comply with the then-existing statutory requirement to evaluate price at contract formation, and agencies were not making true comparative evaluations of offerors’ pricing since there was no factual basis for doing so. And it didn’t matter whether the ID/IQ contract provided for fixed prices, labor hour pricing, or hybrid pricing.

Keep reading article at: https://www.pscouncil.org/a/Content/2019/Can_Contracts_Be_Awarded_Without_Pricing.aspx

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic forced the federal government into emergency spending mode, agencies — including the Defense Department — were on pace to blow past the single-year contract spending record of $598 billion set in fiscal 2019.

The fourth quarter spending surge is upon us, and it appears the federal acquisition community isn’t just focused on getting money out the door, but request for proposals, too.

Agencies spent more on procurement in fiscal 2019 than in any of the previous 10 years.

When U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper launched a review this summer of the departmentwide offices known as the “fourth estate,” he made it clear that everything, including cuts to programs and personnel, were on the table.

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