The reason for the slower business in 2013 was not primarily the dollars sequestered from the federal budget.  Instead the primary cause of slow business was the delay of congress until nearly the end of March 2013 in passing the final budgets for FY 2013.  Since these budgets were not passed until only 6 months before the end of the fiscal year, there was not sufficient time to get all of the programs through the procurement funnel.  So the agencies were forced to spend a more than the normal share of their budgets at year’s end on simple contracts that do not require a complex proposal.

What to Expect in 2014

The general expectation is that business in calendar year 2014 will be better than it was in 2013.  There are several reasons for this optimistic view, which are described as follows: 

  1. The two political parties in congress seem to be working with more harmony than has been the case for most of the time during the past 3 years.  This is in part because, a majority of the national GOP leadership has decided to rein in the their fractious right wing members for the purpose of making the party more able to win in the congressional elections in 2014 and in the presidential election of 2016.  Although no one suffers from the illusion that our debt problems are solved, there is generally less stomach in congress for making the meat axe type of cuts envisioned by some of the more fiscally focused members of congress. 
  2. The congress successfully passed a moderate spending ceiling bill applying to FY 2014 and 2015 with spending caps that are generally higher that the sequestration levels.
  3. There is a reasonable hope that congress will be able to pass some type of an annual appropriation or continuing resolution (CR) at the time the debt ceiling has to be addressed on 15 January 2014.  Even if the final budgets don’t get passed by January 15, most subject matter experts (SMEs) on the congressional budget process expect to see the passage at least by late January or mid February.  And that is one to two months sooner than the final budgets were passed in 2012
  4. If the debt ceiling sticks as is generally expected, the amount of funds sequestered in FY 2014 will be only about half as much as was sequestered in FY 2013
  5. There is a large backlog of big programs that were pushed to the right in 2013 and will have to be processed through the procurement system in 2014

So the bad news is that the debt problems will very likely not be attacked very aggressively in FY 2014.  But the good news is that, if things go as predicted above, there will be significantly more proposal business and a generally better market for proposal work in calendar year 2014.  As a result, consultants will have less time on the bench.