Observations: Fiscal Year 2020 COVID-19 Federal Contracting

The PRAC’s objective was to review pandemic-related federal contracts and identify first-time contractors and contracts awarded without competitive bidding. We found that first-time federal contractors received $4.4 billion worth of pandemic contracts in Fiscal Year 2020 and that $128 million was deobligated from contracts with first-time federal contractors during the same period. Additionally, we identified the four most common flexibilities identified to justify limited competition were urgency, only one source, simplified acquisition procedures, and authorized by statute. Of these, we found that 11% of non-competitive contracts used the “only one responsible source” authority, which is defined to be used when supplies and services are available from only one source in certain conditions. A limited sample revealed that 10 of 14 contracts either shouldn’t have selected that authority or had data entry errors within the Federal Procurement Data System.