No Competition
The Center for Public Integrity has found that about 40% of government contracts are awarded without any competition. The government even hired a contractor to find out how many contractors it has. There is nothing inherently wrong with contracting and sometimes there is only one company who can do the job. I just don't believe that 4 out of 10 is reasonable. Too often, the government agency doing the contract knows the contractor it wants, price be damned, and writes the contract specs so prescriptively that only one contractor meets them. Never mind that plenty of others could do the job that's needed and that (in theory) the policy of the U.S. government is to encourage competion in contracting.