By Frank Konkel, NEXTGOV
The Defense Department continues to spend more than half its contracting dollars without legitimate competition between vendors, according to its Office of Procurement and Acquisition Policy. A competition scorecard for the third quarter of fiscal 2016 released this week by the office shows that of $205 billion awarded in contract spending across DOD, only $101 billion was competed.
That compete percentage, about 49.7 percent of total contract spending, falls short of DOD’s stated 57 percent goal for fiscal 2016, and indicates a continuation of almost a decade of declining competition across the military space for everything including IT systems, professional services and weapons systems.
DOD’s first- and second- quarter competition scorecards showed DOD competed 43.3 percent and 46.5 percent of its awarded contracting dollars, respectively, worse than the first- and second-quarter scorecards in 2015. It seems general policies designed to improve competition in DOD have yet to see results, including a 2014 memo drafted by Frank Kendall, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, to increase competition and push military contractors away from sole-source contracts.