With leaders on Capitol Hill at a standstill on the country’s budget issues, the threat of another debate over the looming debt ceiling and the government’s sequestration having no foreseeable end in sight, many companies in the Northern Virginia/DC area are left feeling its effects.
Washington Exec reached out to area executives in the federal contracting space to share their insights on how this unstable budgetary environment is impacting their customers, business and future initiatives.
David Kervin is the Chief Strategy Officer and Vice President of Business Development for Navstar Inc. gave us his take on how his company is handling the sequestration:
Washington Exec: How has sequestration impacted your customers?
David Kervin: Sequestration is impacting our customer agencies and departments differently depending on the criticality of the work (mission vs. training for example) and the ability of the agency to recognize cost avoidance via infrastructure migration from legacy systems, versus simply cutting positions.
Washington Exec: How has/will sequestration impact your overall business?
David Kervin: Since nearly all of our business is considered mission critical within the Intelligence Community and/or is involved with cloud migration efforts linked to IC-ITE, we have been spared for the most part – but as they say, it isn’t over until it’s over. We remain cautiously optimistic.
Washington Exec: What is your personal view of sequestration?
David Kervin: My concern is for the small business community and particularly those small businesses highly concentrated in non-mission critical functions. There are rumors of some agencies telling primes these areas will be de-funded as part of the cost savings they need to realize in the last six to seven months of this FY, with funding potentially coming again in the new FY. Most small businesses do not have the cash on hand to survive and maintain experienced resources on staff for that period of time. One must wonder if what this ultimately could mean is the bankruptcy of many small and very small businesses, the migration of large chunks of that work to large business primes and ultimately the degradation of continuity and quality to the end customer, all due to the shortsightedness of sequestration.
