M.A. Thomas of John Hopkins University has published a little piece of code that analyzes the government database of contracts to see just how the contracts land amongst the many players in the industry. No surprise, the bulk of the contracts land in the hands of just a few big companies.
Scholars and practitioners are expressing concerns about the impact of unprecedented levels of government contracting on economic and political concentrations of power and on government accountability and transparency. Understanding the total organizational structure of government contractors is key to many of their concerns, such as identifying and resolving organizational conflicts of interest. Until recently, there was little publicly available information on the ownership of government contractors. However, a government database includes partial information, allowing the first visualizations of these ownership structures by means of a STATA program that exports to Netdraw or Pajek.
Obviously this is only as accurate as the database, which is a bit suspect since some big players are missing from that visualization above (Lockheed, Raytheon, CSC, and many others). But his concept and data would make for some great interactive viz, I imagine.
via usgcontractors.info.
Hi Randall,
Glad you enjoyed the paper and the paper and the code. I think you have misunderstood the graphic, however. It is not a visualization of the allocation of government contracts. It is a visualization of a contractor “network” — the ownership structure of *a* contractor. The network is partial and yes, the data quality is very poor. The reason there are several companies in this picture is because they are joined either by joint ventures or by the transfer of a company from one to the other during the period of analysis.
Best,
Melissa
Interesting.. Thanks for the clarification.
Is it for a single contract award, or just general “all services” (where the dots indicate a Primary/Sub relationship)?
The relationships are parent companies and their locations or subsidiaries, so there is no information about contract awards in this graph. That being said, we only have data on the parent-sub relationships for entities that received contracts — which is why the data/network are partial. Take a look at the paper and documentation for more — paper is not that long or dense, I promise. 🙂