Center for Government Contracting News

On Monday, December 12, the Baroni Center for Government Contracting held a webinar to discuss a recent report on how funding flexibility can help bridge the valley of death in defense acquisition. For those who could not make the webinar, we are sharing a video recording of the event and a Report and White Paper produced by the Center as background reading for the discussion.

Examines the impact of M&A strategy on company value in the government contracting community. Our empirical findings show that investors react positively to customer expansion but not as favorable to customer penetration, as financial markets appear to prioritize access to new revenue sources over improving efficiencies.

This paper dives deeper into the history of how the legislative and executive branches managed defense budget portfolios in the 1960s and before, as well as how PPBE upended those traditional processes. The paper concludes that execution flexibility in the form of portfolio budgeting is not only consistent with economic efficiency, it is consistent with United States traditions of congressional control.

George Mason University announced the largest gift to a center within the School of Business from Attain Partners founder and CEO Greg Baroni and his wife, Camille. The first-of-its-kind university center to address business, technology, policy, and regulatory issues in government contracting, the Center for Government Contracting will change its name to the Greg and Camille Baroni Center for Government Contracting in honor of the new donors.

While the platform-based defense budgeting system works well for large capital investments, many other capital investments such as the Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) concept require modular, cross-cutting technologies that do not fit well into program stovepipes. Even when all stakeholders are aligned, there are precious few opportunities to get funding within the traditional resource allocation process. This creates a proverbial “valley of death” that frustrates everyone involved. What types of strategies can inject the execution flexibility necessary to bridge this valley of death and get capabilities in the hands of warfighters?

New market commercial space launch entrants are pursuing goals of affordable and repeatable access to space independent of the space agency. With this context, the paper asks if NASA has been a leader or a follower of the emergence of the modern space age.The paper asks if NASA has been a leader or a follower of the emergence of the modern space age.

Recap of people, research, news and events in July 2022

This report outlines the results of a workshop discussion on Trusted Workforce 2.0 (TW 2.0) implementation and academic initiatives to educate and train today and tomorrow’s cleared government contracting workforce.

The Center for Government Contracting releases a new report, “The Power of Many: Leveraging Consortia to Promote Innovation, Expand the Defense Industrial Base, and Accelerate Acquisition.”

Recap of activities and events in June 2022