As part the U.S. DOGE Service’s offensive, the reviewing and canceling of contracts for things they deem duplicative or unnecessary has been a focal point.
The latest data on the DOGE website claims agencies have terminated 4,083 contracts that is “saving” about $15 billion.
Now President Donald Trump is charging DOGE and agencies to look at contracting processes, procedures and the systems that support those efforts.
By the end of March, agencies have to analyze current contract spending as well as acquisition policies, procedures and personnel.
While current and former federal procurement experts support this type of effort at a broad level, they say the reviews and new requirements are likely duplicative and not solving the actual problems with acquisition.
“What DOGE is finding is bad data problems, not waste, fraud and abuse. The problem is people haven’t cleaned up their data,” said one former federal procurement executive, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation. “DOGE is blindly grabbing for information, without any analysis. It looks like there is something wrong, but there isn’t. They are introducing inefficiencies by creating another system to put bad data in, and they want supervisors to review it. I don’t see where the efficiency is.”
President Trump’s executive order from Feb. 26 aims to reduce contract spending, to bring more transparency to the entire procurement process and to attempt to remove inefficiencies.
The order also freezes government credit cards for 30 days and suspends all nonessential travel for federal employees without justification.
“Each agency head shall, with assistance as requested from the agency’s DOGE team lead, build a centralized technological system within the agency to seamlessly record every payment issued by the agency pursuant to each of the agency’s covered contracts and grants, along with a brief, written justification for each payment submitted by the agency employee who approved the payment,” the EO states. “This system shall include a mechanism for the agency head to pause and rapidly review any payment for which the approving employee has not submitted a brief, written justification within the technological system.”
30-day reviews in process
Additionally, agencies, with DOGE’s help, over the next 30 days will do two things: They will review all existing contracts in the next 30 days to decide whether to terminate or modify contracts and grants to reduce overall federal spending or reallocate spending to promote efficiency. Agencies also will “conduct a comprehensive review” of their contracting policies, procedures and personnel. During this time, agencies shall not issue or approve new contracting officer warrants, unless the agency head approves it.
Acquisition experts pushed back the idea of doing a “comprehensive review” of anything acquisition related in just 30 days, especially given the chaos happening to the workforce with reductions in force and the firing of probationary employees.
Greg Giddens, a partner with Potomac Ridge Consulting and a former executive director of the Office of Acquisition, Logistics, and Construction at the Veterans Affairs Department, said 30 days will give them some obvious things that need to change.
“What are the policies and procedures built up over time and are burdening the workforce? If we can find a way to do risk management versus being so risk intolerant that would be a good start,” he said. “I’d start with the idea of needing so many internal reviews for contracts. You have warranted and trained contracting officers, but in a lot of cases you have 1-2-3 layers of reviews of their work before it gets completed. That is a lot of oversight and reporting.”
Another obvious area to look at are contract close outs. Giddens said there is no real customer or value for them, particularly those contracts under the simplified acquisition threshold of $250,000.
“I don’t think you will get the ultimate answer in 30 days, but this should jump start the process. I think it’s clear that you will not be able to solve everything in 30 days, but there are some things that could be done to increase value and the ability of the acquisition community to do a job better,” Giddens said.
Tim Cooke, president and CEO of ASI Government, said his company has done several broad-based acquisition reviews looking at contracting policies and procedures. Cooke added that as expected, at times the agency customer didn’t approve their recommendations for implementation.
System requirements unclear
Even if DOGE can push past the inherent resistance, or if they choose to ignore it, getting contracting officers to ignore or override federal acquisition rules and regulations is a whole different challenge.
One federal procurement official, who requested anonymity because they didn’t get permission to talk to the press, said there is a lot of fear among employees right now, especially if they come back and say all contracts are essential or required.
“Will anyone care or will they be deemed noncompliant or in opposition of the President’s agenda? Will they then face the idea they will be fired or reassigned?” the official said. “I think a lot of executives are on the hook to make drastic cuts, and I think that will be a big factor in how they look at these contracts.”
While the 30-day review is the most immediate effort, the longer term charge of building new systems to record every payment, include a brief, written justification and receive approval is even a bigger head scratcher for experts.
They say the order is unclear whether agencies are supposed to build new systems or modify existing ones.
The federal procurement executive said the idea is “awesome, but a little out there.”
“Having access to real time payment information so we can negotiate better rates would be amazing. Industry is supposed to give the government their lowest rate and there are suspicions that the Defense Department, for instance, gets one rate and civilian agencies get another. In many ways, we are all competing against each other with a blindfold on so having that information would be amazing,” the official said. “How can we get more insight into what is being bought? If you look at the Federal Procurement Data System and scroll through the NAICS or descriptions that’s really only top level information. We could use large language models to really crunch the data and that give us a better understanding.”
The official, however, added that requiring a written justification is “a paper chase” and wouldn’t do anything to improve efficiency.
“It would be just another memo that the contracting officer or contracting officer representative would have to write up,” the official said. “I do have some concerns about what kinds of information would be shared publicly as well.”
Data remains the problem
At the same time, systems that do much of what the White House is calling for already exists.
Experts say within each agency, even within specific bureaus, contracting officers use an invoice processing system that includes a copy of the invoice, the contract and how much money the agency funded for it. The systems also include the ability to review and approve invoices and add comments explaining why the agency is paying it.
The former federal acquisition official added USASpending.gov already provides much of this information too, that is as long as agencies input the data.
But, ASI Government’s Cooke said, USASpending.gov relies on FPDS and government audits have shown high error rates in that data.
ASI Government worked with the Treasury Department and the IRS in the past to improve the data quality of contracts and validate that they match with the contracting documents.
“We did that using a variety of AI tools. Given the data had high error rates, we went back to the source of the data, the SF 30 and SF 1449 forms, and other documents and compared to what’s in FPDS,” Cooke said. “With ASI’s technology that data could be entered accurately and automatically. Our solution instead focused on correcting the errors we found. our automated solution increased the accuracy of the data to 97% according to the original auditors.”
Other experts say requiring contracting officers to input more data at a time when there are RIFs and other workforce impacts isn’t necessarily a good idea.
Before the pandemic CFO Act agencies were working on a project to reconcile payment information with contract information to make sure all payments were tied to their proper transactions. But that effort fell by the wayside once the pandemic hit.
“My theory is they are throwing a lot of crap out there and creating a big panic. I hope when the dust settles, they start to logically look at these things. There is some goodness here like looking at regulations that create burdens on people and industry,” the former federal procurement executive said. “I really think building a new system is not the answer. It’s not about telling people to rewrite regulations. It’s about applying common sense and looking at the data and fixing it. To me, the administration should be looking at real waste, fraud and abuse. But those are less dramatic than they are making it out to be. It sounds good, but it’s not real. There are problems, but there is real sloppiness of data and shame on agencies for not fixing their data and making sure what’s public is accurate.”
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