Deltek Inc., a leading market research and business management company, announced today that it has been bought by private equity firm Thoma Bravo for roughly $1.1 billion. Deltek, which is now publicly traded, will be privately held under the deal. Deltek’s stockholders will receive $13 in cash for each share when the transaction closes, the company said in a news release. Deltek’s board of directors and its largest shareholder, New Mountain Capital, approved the acquisition. Deltek, which earned $341 million last year and has more than 1,600 employees, provides services to 98 of the top 100 federal contractors. The company’s revenues increased more than 20 percent between 2010…
Browsing: contractors
A recent call made by 26 senators to keep the Defense Department’s contract spending in check has prompted the Professional Services Council trade association to “correct the record.” Several Defense Department policies and spending cuts over the last few years have affected contractors, including a provision in the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act capping Defense Department spending on services for fiscal years 2012 and 2013 at the level of the president’s 2010 budget request, PSC President Stan Soloway said in an April 30 letter to Sens. Sherrod Brown and Kirsten Gillibrand. Brown and Gillibrand led 24 other senators on an April 25 letter…
A House caucus focused on increasing the government’s use of contractors will launch next week, the Business Coalition for Fair Competition (BCFC) announced today. Members of the “Yellow Pages” Caucus believe that if the government is performing a service that is being done by private businesses in the Yellow Pages, then the service should be subject to market competition, the BCFC said in an email and Facebook announcement. “This caucus is being created by a group of like-minded members of Congress to create a forum to work together to lower the cost of government, make it more efficient and get a better idea of what government and…
Government contractors who blow the whistle on improper use of federal dollars or unethical behavior would be protected against retaliation under a bill introduced by Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo. Recent laws that extend protections to some contractors have created a patchwork of inadequate protections, McCaskill, chairwoman of the Senate Contracting Oversight Subcommittee, said during a hearing Tuesday. For example, whistleblower provisions added for defense contractor employees in 2008 do not protect contractors from retaliation by a government official nor does it cover subcontractors. Senate Bill 241 would extend whistleblower protections to all government contractors and subcontractors, and consolidate some of…
In direct response to a presidential order under consideration, lawmakers today introduced two bills to prevent federal agencies from collecting or using information about contractors’ political expenditures. Several lawmakers — most of whom are Republican — have asked the president to abandon his plans for an executive order, a draft of which was leaked last month, that would require potential contractors to report their campaign contributions and political expenditures before being awarded government contracts. After the leak, White House officials said they are considering the policy as a way to add more transparency to the contracting process. But it has been a month with…
The agency that ensures federal contractors are meeting federal employment rules is seeking more information from contractors. The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) says the changes should make the process easier on contractors while also providing better data for their evaluations. But corporate law firms and consultant groups are alerting contractors via their blogs and websites that the additional data OFCCP wants will actually be a new burden for them. OFCCP, which checks contractors’ compliance with federal affirmative action and equal employment opportunity requirements, sends what’s called a Scheduling Letter to contractors selected for a compliance evaluation. That letter lists what data the…
Now here’s what I call strategic workforce planning. The Drug Enforcement Administration is trying to hire up to nine contract linguists who are fluent in Ebonics, according to a request for proposal posted on the Smoking Gun this morning. The RFP, which was originally released in May, said it needs people in Atlanta to “listen to oral intercepts in English and foreign languages and provide a verbal summary, immediately followed by a typed summary” and then transcribe pertinent calls. Ebonics is just one of more than 100 languages requested in the RFP. It’s not surprising that the DEA is looking…
Defense Secretary Robert Gates delivered a tough message earlier today for his department’s bureaucracy (not to mention its contractors): The spending spree is over. Read an account of his Kansas speech and some of his planned changes at our sister publication, Military Times, here. And the Washington Post’s article has this interesting detail on contracting: Among Gates’s apparent targets for major cuts are the private contractors the Pentagon has hired in large numbers over the past decade to take on administrative tasks that the military used to handle. The defense secretary estimated that this portion of the Pentagon budget has…
I did a quick post yesterday on Sen. George Voinovich’s hold on Rafael Borras, announced at yesterday’s DHS management hearing in the Senate Homeland Security committee. One other colloquy from that hearing worth mentioning: Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., got into a discussion with Elaine Duke, the current undersecretary for management, about how many contractors work at DHS. McCaskill has been trying to get a hard number for years; the department finally sent her a spreadsheet last month, which lists 10,520 contractors in the Washington area. But it turns out even that figure might not be accurate. Here’s Duke: The figures…
The State Department “got what it paid for” when it hired embattled contractor ArmorGroup North America to provide security to the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, a new report from the Wartime Contracting Commission found. Unfortunately, the commission also found State had little choice because federal law prohibits the department from choosing security contractors based on performance rather than cost. According to the report: Unlike other federal agencies, the U.S. Department of State is forbidden by law to select anything but the lowest price and ‘technically acceptable’ offer when awarding contracts to protect its overseas buildings — even if this…