This Company Gets 98% of Its Money From the U.S. Government. DOGE Is Coming for Firms Like It.
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This Company Gets 98% of Its Money From the U.S. Government. DOGE Is Coming for Firms Like It.
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Updated Feb. 28, 2025 10:20 am ET
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The Trump administration is looking to cut federal contracts. Few companies stand as exposed as Booz Allen Hamilton BAH -2.26%
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The venerable Washington, D.C., area firm works on projects across the U.S. government. It operates a website visitors use to reserve campsites at national parks. It is modernizing healthcare records for veterans, beefing up technology at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and rolling out a suite of artificial-intelligence and cybersecurity tools across the Department of Defense and other federal agencies.
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Memo calls for review of $65 billion in contracts that go to Booz Allen Hamilton and other big firms that do government work
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Trump administration asks agencies to cull consultants
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The Trump administration is asking agencies to review their consulting contracts with at least 10 large companies, including some global firms, as part of an effort to cut “non-essential consulting contracts.”
The acting head of the General Services Administration, Stephen Ehikian, asked “agency senior procurement executive[s]” to review their consulting contracts with the 10 companies the administration deemed the highest paid using procurement data — Deloitte, Accenture Federal Services, Booz Allen Hamilton, General Dynamics, Leidos, Guidehouse, Hill Mission Technologies Corp., Science Applications International Corporation, CGI Federal and International Business Machines Corporation — in a memo dated Feb. 26 obtained by Nextgov/FCW.
Those 10 companies “are set to receive over $65 billion in fees in 2025 and future years,” Ehikian wrote.
“This needs to, and must, change,” he added in bold.
GSA had already asked agencies to review all contracts with the firms in question, as well as affiliates, and terminate all except those deemed mission critical and as giving “substantive, imperative technical support,” Ehikian wrote.
“Not enough action has been taken,” he continued. “We request each agency review these consulting contracts again given the size and scope.”
He gave agency procurement executives until March 7 to give a list of contracts with the firms in question that their agencies are keeping and those they’re terminating, along with a “signed statement from a senior official” verifying the criticality of any the agency is maintaining.
All 10 companies listed in the memo hold prime positions on OASIS, a government-wide contract vehicle run by GSA that other federal agencies use to acquire professional services that are not tech-centric in nature.
OASIS opened for business in 2014 and agencies have since collectively obligated approximately $46.7 billion in spending against the vehicle, according to data from GovExec’s market intelligence division GovTribe.
Six of OASIS’ 10 largest spending recipients to-date are cited in the memo: Booz Allen, SAIC, Leidos, General Dynamics IT, Hill Mission Technologies Corp. and Deloitte.
Many of the listed companies are also included on Alliant 2 and CIO-SP3 contracts, and the GSA schedule.
It’s unclear if all procurement employees at all agencies received the notice or only those at larger federal agencies. A GSA spokesperson didn’t clarify what agencies received the memo, referring Nextgov/FCW to specific agencies for information about specific agency contracts, but did say in a statement that “GSA has taken immediate action to fully implement all current executive orders and is committed to taking action to implement any new executive orders.”
The notice comes alongside a new executive order directing agencies to build centralized tech to record all payments issued through contracts and grants, along with justification for those payments. Agency leaders were also told to review all grants and contracts within 30 days and terminate or modify them to reduce spending under that executive order.
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has been touting contract cancellations across agencies already, although the DOGE’s savings calculations are riddled with errors, the New York Times reported. Four contracts on the DOGE’s “Wall of Receipts,” for example, were found to have zero savings, as Washington Technology reported Tuesday.
“For decades, IBM has been advocating the use of technology to help U.S. federal agencies streamline operations, increase efficiency and deliver better return on taxpayer dollars,” an IBM spokesperson told Nextgov/FCW in a statement. “Today, IBM supports the modernization and delivery of mission critical federal services and systems, from processing veteran health claims more quickly, to enabling a more efficient digital taxpayer experience. We are proud of this and our additional work across the U.S. government and are committed to helping agencies become more efficient and deliver better results for the American public.”
GDIT, CGI and Leidos declined to comment, and Nextgov/FCW has reached out to other companies named on the memo.
If you have a tip you’d like to share, Natalie Alms can be securely contacted at nalms.41 on Signal.
NEXT STORY: StateRAMP to rebrand later this year
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The nationwide nonprofit that authorizes cloud service cybersecurity for state government use will rebrand later this year, the group’s executive director exclusively told Route Fifty this week.
The State Risk and Authorization Management Program, known as StateRAMP, will rebrand itself to “GovRAMP” to better reflect that the voluntary program can be used by local governments, educational institutions, hospitals and others, Leah McGrath said. An official announcement of the rebrand, which the board approved in December, is expected this month.
McGrath said the shift in branding reflects the growing emphasis on whole-of-state cybersecurity approaches, where all levels of government share information and best practices while recognizing that a threat against one is a threat against all. StateRAMP and GovRAMP will continue to be used “interchangeably,” McGrath said, to reflect that some states use the original name in various policies, laws and documents.
“Almost as soon as we launched StateRAMP, we started hearing from local governments, K-12 schools and higher education, and they said, ‘We really love this. Is this something we can do?’” McGrath told Route Fifty in an interview. “The name StateRAMP felt limiting for them, and so we’ve had conversations about, ‘how can we improve that communication, especially as we’re working more deeply with some of our participating states on whole-of-state initiatives? How do we make sure that people know that this is something they can leverage across all the different levels of government and public sector?’”
The rebrand marks another chapter in a busy time for StateRAMP, which is used in 27 states to authorize cloud services state governments can use to ensure they satisfy standardized security requirements. It also has inspired several state-level equivalents, like Texas’ TX-RAMP, which the state stood up in just five months.
One of its biggest recent initiatives has been around cyber framework harmonization, which streamlines the patchwork of rules and guidelines issued by various government agencies that businesses and the public sector must then comply with. Federal regulations on cybersecurity are set by myriad agencies, which all have different auditing requirements and a web of standards to follow that sometimes vary.
It’s something lawmakers have tried to make progress on as well. For state and local leaders, cyber requirements can be “painful,” but McGrath said that “when something is painful enough, people are willing to give time to fix it.”
“We go where the pain is the greatest, and we hear that this is painful,” she continued. “The other way that we tackle this is to not recreate the wheel. We don’t want to recreate the wheel, and we don’t want to create a project just to create a project. We want to solve problems, and we know there are many people out there trying to solve this problem, so let’s just come together. One of the things that we do well is serve as a facilitator, and through that facilitation, identify big wins and small wins that help solve the problem and make it a little better.”
It may be that cyber frameworks are never truly harmonized, given the “uniqueness” that exists in individual jurisdictions, agencies, contracts or data, McGrath said. Getting most of the way there, though, will make things more “manageable,” she added.
It’s been a similar story for StateRAMP’s task force that focuses on boosting cloud security within the criminal justice sector to align with the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Criminal Justice Information Services. As with framework harmonization, McGrath said that task force contains state and local representatives as well as industry leaders to “align around the unique definitions or parameters that are required by the FBI,” then align that to StateRAMP’s requirements.
“Every one of our members has their own mapping that they’ve done to all these various requirements, so what we really tried to do is facilitate the conversation so we can all come around common mapping and understanding,” McGrath added.
StateRAMP enjoys a synergistic relationship with its federal equivalent — the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, or FedRAMP — that is operated by the General Services Administration. The future of that agency’s tech shop appears somewhat uncertain, however, and so may throw into doubt how much more collaboration there could be between the federal government and the states.
But McGrath said she remains optimistic about the future, as disruption at the federal level may mean it is a “good time to have a conversation on federal cyber regulations and how we make that better.”
“Sometimes when there’s a lot of disruption, change becomes less daunting because change is inevitable,” she added.
NEXT STORY: DEI programs vanish across the GovCon landscape
