Latest / The Fiscal Policy Podcast with Fexingo: Government Budgets, Stimulus, and Public Spending
How One Procurement Rule Adds 30 Percent to Every Government Contract
In this episode of The Fiscal Policy Podcast, Lucas and Luna dig into the obscure but costly Walsh-Healey Public Contracts Act of 1936, which mandates minimum wage determinations on all federal contracts over $15,000. They trace how a Depression-era labor protection has metastasized into a bureaucracy that adds an estimated 30 percent premium to government procurement. Using the example of a hypothetical $10 million IT services contract—$3 million in compliance overhead before a single line of code is written—they explain the perverse incentives: agencies bundle work into giant contracts to…
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