Center for Government Contracting White Papers

Researchers at GMU’s Baroni Center on Government Contracting present landmark findings grounded in empirical evidence developed through six real-world case studies

The Greg and Camille Baroni Center for Government Contracting has released a comprehensive analysis on the impact of raising the Micro-Purchase Threshold (MPT) for federal acquisition and small business participation.

Current government acquisition rules are depriving DoD from consistently getting the benefits of the best industry talent, the best commercial capabilities, and quicker transition and deployment of needed capabilities. If the regulatory burden and negative incentives are not addressed head on, no amount of outreach or training will bring businesses back into the defense marketplace—or keep them from leaving. . . . In this decisive decade, acquisition regulations and policy must be streamlined to deliver outcomes and informed by data gathered through continued analysis of the shrinking defense industrial base from multiple perspectives—and most importantly, through difficult conversations with industry partners.

This study sought to identify important trends in DoD’s supplier base and its rates of effective competition and market concentration, and importantly compare these trends with the rest of the federal government and its contractor base.

While the origins of the Small Business Administration’s (SBA) Small Disadvantaged Business (SDB) contracting program and its prime contracting goals date to 1958, the history of the program is one of ebbs and flows. While the SDB appellation has applied at both the prime and subcontracting level, this paper will concern itself with prime contracting opportunities. However, before examining the data on the SDB program, it is important to understand the origins and evolutions of the program, as they provide the context necessary to assess the current performance of the program.

The latest White Paper of the Greg and Camille Baroni Center for Government Contracting, “Back to the Future? Second Sourcing in Defense Acquisitions” argues: “Second sourcing in particular offers one strategy to counter the DoD’s unsightly dependence on single and sole sources of supply. Second Sourcing does not provide a panacea to all the supply chain issues faced by DoD, but an increase in the use of second sourcing methods could be used to pivot the U.S. defense industrial base away from the current status quo of peacetime efficiency and towards a new baseline of readiness to ensure overmatch against competitors like Russia and China.”

This paper looks at how Presidents have used their authority under the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act of 1949 (FPASA) to issue Executive Orders shaping the Federal acquisition system. 

Examines the impact of M&A strategy on company value in the government contracting community. Our empirical findings show that investors react positively to customer expansion but not as favorable to customer penetration, as financial markets appear to prioritize access to new revenue sources over improving efficiencies.

This paper dives deeper into the history of how the legislative and executive branches managed defense budget portfolios in the 1960s and before, as well as how PPBE upended those traditional processes. The paper concludes that execution flexibility in the form of portfolio budgeting is not only consistent with economic efficiency, it is consistent with United States traditions of congressional control.

New market commercial space launch entrants are pursuing goals of affordable and repeatable access to space independent of the space agency. With this context, the paper asks if NASA has been a leader or a follower of the emergence of the modern space age.The paper asks if NASA has been a leader or a follower of the emergence of the modern space age.