Before the coronavirus outbreak, the contracting community expressed “high confidence” in public sector sales for 2020, expressing optimism in steady government buying following 2019’s lengthy government shutdown that set many companies back.
Now, amid a pandemic with no end in sight, a largely remote workforce and other contractor challenges, the contracting forecast for 2020 and beyond is much less certain.
“We saw a strong performance across the board in 2019, and as we entered 2020, the outlook was rosy,” said Amy Champigny, senior product marketing manager at Deltek. “Now, to some degree, that has happened, but not in the way people expected. The COVID-19 pandemic is going to force a lot of contractors to think carefully about how they come out of this.”
Champigny spoke with Nextgov about Deltek’s Clarity Government Contracting Industry Study, a wide-scale survey of hundreds of government contractors regarding issues, trends and opportunities impacting the market. At the time the survey was fielded—between Jan. 6 and March 2—70% of contractors expected government sales to be higher in 2020 than 2019. Now, “consensus expectations call for significant negative growth in the second half of 2020, and there is not yet a clear path to recovery,” the authors state.
Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2020/06/contractor-confidence-government-market-less-certain-amid-pandemic/166406/
What are the government’s requirements? What are its priorities? What is its budget? When will it receive its funding? When will solicitations be issued? When will contract awards be made? Once contract awards are completed, will they last? Will the program survive? What will be the effect on existing contracts of changes in budget priorities, funding reallocations, funding stoppages, funding shortages, government shutdowns, stop-gap funding, the administration’s changing or still unknown goals and intent, etc.?
