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 four.
