Professional Services Council President and CEO David Berteau said Wednesday that a glut of executive orders, coupled with inconsistent guidance, is challenging contractors and acquisition professionals

Professional Services Council President and CEO David Berteau said Wednesday that a glut of executive orders, coupled with inconsistent guidance, is challenging contractors and acquisition professionals anyaberkut / Getty Images

Breakneck pace of executive orders and lagging, unclear guidance leave contractors guessing

The Professional Services Council president and CEO said that contractors may not know the criteria spending programs are being reviewed under or who’s doing them while they wait. 

The breathless pace at which the Trump administration has issued new executive orders, paused contract and grants spending and potentially upended the federal workforce has left government contractors largely waiting to see if their programs are moving forward, without a lot of answers from agency officials.

Professional Services Council President and CEO David Berteau said on a media call Wednesday that the contracting trade association has been keeping track of the torrent of overlapping executive orders that have emerged from the White House over the past week, but because they are applied in expansive and intersecting ways, contractors aren’t sure where they stand amid policy pronouncements, reversals and clarifications.

“There’s such a wide range of coverage of these and there are similarities across different ones — for instance, you have spending on obligations and disbursements that go agency-by-agency and there are some that are governmentwide — they are not always internally consistent and, in particular, they are often raising questions inside the agency,” he said. 

Berteau said that while spending reviews are common for new administrations, the entanglement of what he called an unprecedented number of executive orders from the Trump White House has left contractors seeking clarity from acquisition officials.

“We’d like to know what criteria, who’s doing the review, what’s the timetable for the review; those are things that are not clear to the agencies themselves that are implementing them, so there’s a lot of questions coming back up,” he said. 

The speed, and often lack of specificity, with which the Trump administration has paused federal spending has recently rippled uncertainty throughout the government and beyond, such as when the White House unilaterally halted federal grants, loans and assistance programs Tuesday, only later clarifying that it the freeze did not apply to programs providing direct assistance to individuals, such as Social Security and Medicare. 

A federal judge later temporarily halted the order minutes before it was supposed to take effect and the Office of Management and Budget later rescinded it on Wednesday

At the General Services Administration, agency officials paused “new GSA-funded obligations” without elaborating whether that included programs specific to the agency or if it extended to products and services that federal government’s buyer provides to other agencies as well. 

The Defense Department had to clarify Tuesday that Army contracts were not on hold after reports surfaced that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had called to a review of forthcoming contract solicitations to ensure they removed diversity, equity, and inclusion language required by another Trump executive order

Berteau said he expects further clarification will emerge following the “confusing communications from DOD and the Army,” but that the issue speaks to the broader confusion within acquisition circles across the federal government, particularly for contractors working with multiple agencies.

“Different guidances are coming out at different paces with different levels of precision and clarity, and that level of confusion really needs to be done away with to the maximum extent possible,” he said. “I’m not aware of any comprehensive laydown of what every agency is doing or how they are doing it, and I think that confusion extends down to the program manager and the contracting officers as well.”

Regardless of ever-shifting agency action, Berteau stressed that the only guidance that can affect a federal contract must come from the contracting officer associated with it.

“So if an executive order says stop work, if a memorandum from the secretary of cabinet department says stop work, that has no contractual effect,” he said. “Under the Federal Acquisition Regulation, the only guidance that can be issued to stop work is a written stop-work order issued by a cognizant contracting officer.”