The sequester, the winding down of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and overall budget cuts produced an 11 percent decline in federal contract spending in fiscal 2013, according to the third annual Bloomberg federal industry leaders study released on Tuesday.
With spending on defense contracts slowing by 15 percent, overall federal contracting fell from $516.3 billion in fiscal 2012 to $462.1 billion in fiscal 2013.
The companies leading Bloomberg’s list of the top 200 contractors remained defense firms, with their rankings unchanged from the previous study. The five companies that did the most business with the government in fiscal 2013 were: Lockheed Martin Corp., with $44.3 billion in contracts; Boeing Co., with $21.6 billion; General Dynamics Corp., with $14 billion; Raytheon Co., with $13.7 billion; and Northrop Grumman Corp., with $10.8 billion.
“All three companies in the top 10 that increased their contract totals — Lockheed Martin, Huntington Ingalls and McKesson Corp. (No. 10) — benefited because they worked on politically protected programs,” the analysts wrote. Those programs were the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter for Lockheed Martin, a “number of warships for Huntington Ingalls and pharmaceuticals for the Veterans Administration for McKesson.”
Keep reading this article at: http://www.govexec.com/contracting/2014/04/budget-cuts-bring-11-percent-decline-contract-spending-2013/82972
