https://www.dau.edu
could design effective future interventions to address the most prevalent reasons for contractor exodus. Hence, the authors conducted this study to explicitly address this important gap in the contracting community’s collective knowledge. Method Data and Procedure The authors relied on data from two well-known federal sources for contract and contractor data: USASpending.gov and SAM.gov. The Award Data Archive from USASpending.gov contains batches of contract transaction data for nearly all federal government prime contract awards. The raw data utilized for this study were all DoD prime contracts from FY 2015 to FY 2022; the contract data files were from the February 8, 2023, batch. SAM.gov provides data on all active contractors as well as contractors that became inactive during the previous 6 months. This study relied on a contractor information file downloaded on June 6, 2021. The datedness of the file is because the current portal at SAM.gov no longer displays entity contact information. The authors used these data to first identify contractors that had presumably exited and then to match each contractor with any available contact information. To identify the contractors that had ostensibly exited the DIB, a list of unique contractors based on recipient Unique Entity Identifier (UEI) for each fiscal year was first generated. UEI is a unique alphanumeric identifier for an awardee or recipient, used by the federal government to identify a specific commercial, nonprofit, or business entity. A UEI with no record of contract action in all subsequent years was determined to indicate an exiting contractor; therefore, the last year a contractor performed a contract action is considered the year their status changed to a DIB exiting contractor. This also means that FY 2021 is the last year in our sample frame, with FY 2022 being the final year that could be used to determine an exited contractor. Once the authors identified the presumed exited contractors, they then matched those contractors to at least one point of contact based on the entity data from SAM.gov. Table 1 presents the breakdown of the presumed exiting contractors and points of contact matched to contractors per fiscal year. Based on this process, 83,175 contractors presumably exited the DIB from FY 2015 to FY 2021. For the survey, the authors matched 89,799 points of contact to 45,297
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Defense ARJ, Summer 2025, Vol. 32 No. 2: 194—223
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