The Homeland Security Department spent nearly a third of its discretionary budget on contracts in fiscal 2017, according to a Feb. 22 report from federal market analyst Deltek. The $51 billion 2017 DHS appropriation bought $16.3 billion in goods and services. The proportion of budget spent on procurement has risen each year since 2014, from 29 percent to 32 percent in 2017.
Spending rose above 2016 levels in several categories: professional services by 12 percent, to about $5 billion; architecture, engineering and construction by 25 percent, to about $1.1 billion; and shipbuilding by 108 percent, to about $0.9 billion. Information technology spending fell 3 percent, to about $4.7 billion, and defense and aerospace procurement was down 29 percent, to about $1 billion.
The big winner in IT was CSRA with about $554 million in DHS spending, about 12 percent of the 2017 IT procurement total. The top 10 IT vendors collected $1.7 billion, or more that 37 percent of all DHS IT spending for the year.
President Trump requested $44 billion in discretionary budget authority for DHS for fiscal 2018, but since the fiscal year began on Oct. 1 federal agencies have been operating under a series of five continuing resolutions that hold funding at fiscal 2017 spending levels.
The current continuing resolution funding government ends March 23, when Congress is expected to issue an omnibus spending bill detailing 2018 funding for all agencies. Under federal law, they will have to spend the bulk of it in about six months, by Sept. 30, 2018, the end of the government’s fiscal year, as detailed in a Feb. 21 report in Homeland Security Today.
Trump sought $47.5 billion in discretionary budget authority for DHS in his fiscal 2019 request issued Feb. 12, Homeland Security Today reported Feb. 13. That was an increase of about $3.7 billion, or 8.4 percent, over the 2018 DHS request. However, the 2019 request does not reflect the full effect of a two-year spending agreement the president signed on Feb. 9, too late to be fully reflected in the budget request.
Under the agreement, Congress raised the caps on fiscal 2018 and fiscal 2019 federal spending set in the 2011 Budget Control Act. For fiscal 2018, civilian agencies, DHS among them, will receive $63 billion more than the capped amount. The 2018 White House budget request would have cut total 2018 domestic spending by $54 billion.
Read more at Deltek.
