Mary-Louise Hoffman
Contractors providing support to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security could face stop-work orders and late payments if Congress does not extend the agency’s budget, the Washington Business Journal reported Wednesday.
“Service providers and suppliers of this department do not get paid during the period of the shutdown, again, because there’s no money or because our ability to process payments have been furloughed,” DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson told the publication.
Jill Aitoro writes Adm. Paul Zukunft, commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, wrote in a blog post that a DHS shutdown would also affect the military branch’s maritime security operations and almost $1 billion in acquisition and maintenance programs.
A report by the Office of Management and Budget indicated the U.S. government issued approximately 10,000 stop-work orders during the 2013 federal shutdown, Aitoro said.
Bloomberg Government estimated DHS awarded fiscal 2013 contracts worth $12.7 billion combined to multiple companies, including Computer Sciences Corp., General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Science Applications International Corp.
