Trend 1. Increased National Defense Spending
The Act provides $654.6 billion in both base and Global War on Terror/Overseas Contingency Operations funding – the largest year-to-year enlarge due to the fact that the beginning of the War on Terror. The consignment represents biggest investment in country wide defense in 15 years. As is usually the case, increased defense spending will waft down to Government contractors offering them new possibilities to offer national defense merchandise and offerings to the Federal Government.
Trend 2. Uptick for Homeland Security
The Act consists of $47.8 billion for the Department of Homeland Security, an make bigger of $5.4 billion over the remaining fiscal year. Many of these dollars will be spent in the form of contracts to bolster border infrastructure, add extra “boots on the ground,” and enhance surveillance technology. Arguably, this is progress for authorities contractors, even if none of the dollars is reachable for the true construction of the President’s border wall.
Trend 3. New Emphasis on Infrastructure Projects
The Act includes more than $21 billion for infrastructure projects across the country, including transportation, energy, water and certain critical facilities. The President’s campaign promise to modernize infrastructure is beginning to gain traction.
Trend 4. High Priority Focus on School Safety
Recent excessive profile tragedies have riveted the nation’s attention on helping shield youngsters and to promote protected learning environments. The Act gives more than $2.3 billion in new funding for danger identification, intellectual health, training, and school protection programs at the Departments of Justice, Education, and Health and Human Services.
Trend 5. Heightened Efforts to Achieve IT Modernization
Several billion greenbacks are devoted to data technologies to tackle pervasive and cross-cutting challenges for all of Government. Cybersecurity, shared services, agile development, commercial off-the-shelf software, cloud migration, data-center consolidation, big data, block chain, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things are opening new business opportunities for Government contractors.
Trend 6. Increased Use of Innovative Contracting Mechanisms
The Defense Department is experimenting with a kind of simplified acquisition process known as Other Transactional Authority (OTA). An underlying cause of OTA is to encourage nontraditional defense contractors to advance progressive technologies, even though more regular defense contractors also participate. Observers count on OTAs to gain footholds in different corporations as DoD satisfactory tunes processes to expedite acquisition of contracts for merchandise and services.
Trend 7. Further GovCon Market Consolidations
Look for the heightened pace of M&A undertaking to continue in the GovCon sector for at least the subsequent 12-18 months. Market leaders searching for entry into new market sectors and hope to obtain economies of scale thru consolidation and discount in overhead accounts.
Trend 8. Continued Elimination of Regulations That Are Onerous, Duplicative, or Outdated
The passage of The Act has—perhaps indirectly—validated many of the regulatory reforms sought with the aid of the Trump Administration from its inception. Stated another way, there is little supporting proof found in The Act warranting an make bigger in red tape and regulatory obstacles. This is true information for the personal sector, normally extra familiar with commercial models for doing business.
Trend 9. More Equitable Distribution of the Federal Procurement “Pie”
It appears that these drafting the Act in its early levels had been keenly conscious of the need to maximize the participation of small and socio-economically numerous companies. It is even plausible that years of focused lobbying efforts by industry businesses and others are sooner or later opening up extra contracting opportunities to mid-sized companies as well.
Trend 10. New Opportunities for Industry in Combatting the Opioid Crisis
The Act consists of almost $4 billion in resources to combat the opioid disaster that President Trump has declared as a countrywide emergency. This will open new opportunities for contractors to help in in treatment, prevention, and law enforcement efforts to end the unfold of these hazardous pills and assist households and communities get the assistance they need. R&D firms are anticipated to extend their involvement in the combat against opioid addiction.
