Policy Consulting in the USA: New Evidence from the Federal Procurement Data System - Next Generation

Abstract

Governmental use of consultancy services has long been a concern for scholars of public administration, management and political science. Empirical studies of policy-related consulting are scarce, however, with little quantitative data. This is true of the largest and most archetypal case of government contracting, the United States, which has received very little detailed treatment, despite a plethora of anecdotal and popular accounts claiming to have documented a pattern of exponential growth in the size and impact of policy-related government contracting. This paper reports on the distribution of the American federal government’s contracting of policy services in the context of several new initiatives on the part of the Obama administration which provide reasonably accurate data related to questions about the size, trends and other aspects of US federal government policy consulting.