Big drop in contracts

Federal contract spending dropped by 3.1% in fiscal 2012, the largest one-year decline since 1997, according to a new study from Bloomberg Government.

Federal agencies spent $516 billion on contracts in fiscal 2012, compared with $533 billion a year earlier.

“After a decade of gains for contractors, this has become a decade of retrenchment,” Brian Friel, study author, said in a Washington Post report on the findings. “Even before sequestration, these companies started repositioning themselves for tighter federal budgets and limited areas of growth.”

The recent decrease compares with a 5.5% dip in fiscal 1997.

DOD contracting dip

Pentagon officials announced $19 billion in awards in April, about 22% lower than in the same period a year ago, according to Bloomberg Government.

Analysts said the slowdown likely was a result of the $37 billion in cuts under sequestration this year. The automatic reductions began on March 1.

April’s award total was 34% less than the monthly average of $28.8 billion in the 12 months ended March 31, the study said.

MILCON budget “safe”

Sequestration will have little impact on Pentagon construction programs in fiscal 2013, department officials said, according to Federal News Radio.

The outlook is based on new calculations by the Office of Management and Budget.

While the funds for new facilities are considered safe, there is pressure on operations and maintenance of existing buildings.

More information: Federal News Radio article: http://goo.gl/CU72p

Low wages

Federal funding for contracts, grants and small business loans directly supports about 2 million low-wage jobs paying $12 or less per hour, according to a new study by Demos, a policy think tank.

A group of workers and community leaders are using the study to launch the Good Jobs Nation effort to draw attention to low wages.

More information: Demos news release http://goo.gl/p6G0U

PSC: Change OASIS

The Professional Services Council is recommending that the General Services Administration revise how it views past performance in OASIS contracts.

According to the OASIS draft solicitation, federal government work is given greater weight in scoring than commercial work.

“We urge GSA to reconsider the significant variation in scoring for commercial and federal government work and to revise the scoring so that evaluations of commercial work are given the same weight as government evaluations,” Stan Soloway, president of PSC, said in a statement.

The industry group also wants to equalize past performance scoring of state and local government work vs. federal government work. Federal work currently has more weight.

Obama’s open data plan

The White House released an open data policy, executive order and online toolkit for implementation in a bid to increase economic activity involving government data.

The idea is that by making large amounts of federal data available to the public, entrepreneurs will develop new applications and create new commercial products and services. That already has happened to a large extent with federal weather, shipping, financial and geographic data, for example.

More information: White House news release http://goo.gl/qkLEa

GovCon Community

The community mourns the death of Jim Regan, director of the Virginia Procurement Technical Assistance Program (PTAP) at George Mason University.

In other news, Jack Beecher, deputy for small business at the Army Corps of Engineers-Norfolk, VA office, has retired. Adam Ball has been named to the post.

Mark Oliver, former OSDBU director at the Interior Department, is now senior partnerships advisor in the office of the secretary.