Top 20 Federal Opportunities for FY 2012

The FY 2012 Top 20 Opportunities represent $148.5 billion of upcoming programs, a 2 percent increase from the total value of last year’s list, which totaled $142 billion. Defense agencies account for $139.2 billion of the total for 2012. This represents the fourth time in five years that Defense programs have dominated the list. 2010 is the only year in the last five years when civilian opportunities represented the majority. 2010 appears to be an anomaly, when there were multiple high value civilian acquisitions.

Key Points:

• Multiple award, task order-based contracting vehicles feature prominently in this year’s list, as in prior years, as we continue to observe agencies establishing (or re-establishing) contract vehicles that allow them to leverage pre-negotiated terms and conditions with a limited set of vendors through which to compete individual projects.
• Re-competitions, or follow-on procurements to existing contracts, continue to dominate the landscape. 85 percent of the top 20 have incumbent providers for the services required. Many of these procurements, like Navy NGEN, are not direct follow on contracts, but rather substantially reformulated or consolidated procurements. The tight budget environment is clearly limiting the amount of new work. Further, agencies seem content to avoid large scale developmental projects awarded to a single vendor.
• 40 percent of the top 20 for FY2012 appeared on the last year’s report. The uncertain budget environment and indecisiveness by agencies has caused significant delays for several opportunities from last year’s list. Deltek has actively monitored these requirements since last year and is projecting they will emerge in 2012.