Here’s a small update on an on-going stream of reporting I’ve been at work on – the hows, whys, and miscellaneous mechanics of contract terminations across the federal government. I did that piece on the contracts killed at VA and how they seemed entirely or at least heavily focused on contract code NAICS-541611, which is for “Administrative Management and General Management Consulting Services.” I said earlier this week that from data in just a couple departments I had the strong impression that DOGE had made incursions into various agencies, pulled up the contracts under this heading and ordered them canceled. Usually they gave some set of either contract officers or stakeholders very brief periods to argue for a reprieve, often just a matter of a few hours. (Just how that was done seemed to vary and played a big role in what was eventually cut.) In every case I’d seen these cuts had been made with no real effort to discover what kind of contracts were being listed under that code and no effort to find out what the contracts were for.
I’ve now gotten significant insight into how this happened at more than a dozen different agencies and departments and the MO is the same in every case. So while I can’t say that it was identical everywhere, since I haven’t gotten visibility into each agency and department, the evidence is now very strong that that is the case.
Separately I learned more about some contract cancelations that were not in this category at the VA. So there are exceptions. And I suspect that’s the case in all the agencies. So it’s probably best to say that the DOGErs went for bulk hitting this one code and then for various incidental, arbitrary or political reasons went after others as well. But the bulk, really the overwhelming number, is in that category. A source in one agency had peered around through other agency databases (all publicly available but where you’d need to know what to look for) and saw that it was the same pattern.
The key point as I explained in those earlier posts is that that code was being used as basically a catch-all for almost everything under the sun. Which sort of makes sense. “Administrative management” becomes ‘everything we don’t have staff to do ourselves or which we’ve been told to outsource’. The DOGErs interpreted it as frilly business consultant BS and tried to cancel all of them. They ranged from everything from direct doctor patient care at VA to the system that manages bulk payments to private insurers for Medicare Advantage at CMS. So pretty key stuff.
