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October 19, 2020 By cs

Civilian agency contract spending reaches record high in FY20

The novel coronavirus pandemic largely contributed to the increase, Bloomberg Government reports.

Civilian agencies’ contract spending hit a record high of $228 billion in fiscal 2020, an increase of 17% ($33.5 billion) from 2019. The surge in spending is mainly due to the novel coronavirus pandemic.

The Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs and Energy departments drove the increase in spending, Bloomberg Government said in a report.  Of the $228 billion, 26% or $59.4 billion went to small businesses, a $6.5 billion increase from fiscal 2019.

“In previous years there’s been single digit jumps, so this is a huge jump compared to previous years,” Robert Levinson, senior defense analyst at Bloomberg Government, told Government Executive.  He noted that there is a 90-day delay for the Defense Department’s contract spending for security purposes and there is also classified spending that will never be released.

HHS, which spent $41.2 billion in fiscal 2020 in contract obligations, accounted for 44% of the $33.5 billion in overall increased civilian contract spending.  The majority of HHS’ spending was for vaccines, research, ventilators and other pandemic-related efforts.  Some of these contracts, such as for a public relations campaign to “inspire hope” about the pandemic and new data reporting system, have drawn concern from Democratic lawmakers.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.govexec.com/management/2020/10/civilian-agency-contract-spending-reaches-record-high-fiscal-2020/169127/

Filed Under: Government Contracting News Tagged With: contract payments, coronavirus, COVID-19, Energy Dept., government spending, health care, HHS, obligations, pandemic, VA

August 14, 2018 By AMK

Here’s what Treasury’s data lab found in 10 years of federal contracting data

Federal agencies tend to spend the most money on contractors the week after a continuing resolution and the week before the end of the fiscal year, according to the latest data set released by the Treasury Department’s Fiscal Service Data Lab.

The team at the Data Lab are on a quest to make federal spending data more accessible, in terms of physical access to the data, as well as making it easier for people to understand.

“We believe that data plus use equals value and want to inspire others to use USAspending data to create their own value,” said Daniel Cain, director of data transparency at the Fiscal Service. “These new tools help to answer these interesting but complicated questions and shows the power of the data available on USAspending.gov.”

The first data sets and visualizations went live in April. The team released a new data set and analysis breaking down federal contract spending from 2007 to 2018.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/analytics-data/2018/07/heres-what-treasurys-data-lab-found-10-years-federal-contracting-data/149832/

Filed Under: Government Contracting News Tagged With: obligations, spending, Traesury, USASpending

January 25, 2018 By AMK

Agencies failed to identify over a quarter of IT contracts in 2016

A recent Government Accountability Office report has found that within 22 federal agencies reviewed, 31,493 IT contracts accounting for $4.5 billion went unidentified by those agencies in 2016.

The Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act, or FITARA, enacted in 2014, requires covered agencies’ chief acquisition officers to identify IT contracts for the chief information officers to review and approve. However, GAO found that nearly 30 percent of those contracts were not identified appropriately in 2016.

“The percentage of additional IT contract obligations GAO identified varied among the selected agencies. For example, the Department of State did not identify 1 percent of its IT contract obligations. Conversely, 8 agencies did not identify over 40 percent of their IT-related contract obligations,” the report said.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.federaltimes.com/federal-oversight/2018/01/12/agencies-failed-to-identify-over-a-quarter-of-it-contracts-in-2016/

Filed Under: Government Contracting News Tagged With: FITARA, GAO, IT, obligations

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