Competition and Bidding Data as an Indicator of the Health of the U.S. Defense Industrial Base

Abstract

Promoting competition in contracting has been a focus of Department of Defense (DoD) efforts for many years, but this focus has heightened in recent years as defense budgets have declined dramatically. Though there has been much written about the results of these efforts, most of the literature has focused on rates of competition for the DoD overall. In previous work on DoD contracting, however, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has found that competition rates vary not just on what is being purchased, but by who in the DoD is doing the purchasing. This research effort builds upon previous CSIS work on defense contracting, using publicly available data from the Federal Procurement Data System. The study team has undertaken to build a predictive model of defense contracting, identifying factors that correlate with higher or lower rates of effective competition, and using data from past years to generate an expected rate of competition. With this model, CSIS digs a step deeper by examining trends in competition by Place of Performance (states) and by Major Contracting Command. The findings from this analysis are used to generate an improved predictive model, which is previewed in this report.