We performed an in-depth analysis of all public US federal (sub)contracting data over the last four and a half years to estimate the rankings of tech companies, both in and out of Silicon Valley, as contractors with the military, law enforcement, and diplomatic arms of the United States.
We hope to address the alarmist claims from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and corporate executives that a tech company — namely, Google — electing to not directly contribute to weapons systems is “treasonous” and part of a divide between Silicon Valley and the US military that is a “national-security threat”.
… this report only involves the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS), which, since 2010, has been run by IBM through the General Services Administration. At roughly 1:30AM ET each day, anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 new award modification summaries are made available through an ATOM feed provided by the official source for FPDS data, fpds.gov.
That was from an article from Jack Poulson, “Reports of a Silicon Valley/Military Divide Have Been Greatly Exaggerated.” HT: Roger Y.
I invite you to read the whole thing and review the analysis. My opinion was that a fair amount of work was done, but it asked all the wrong questions. It took 22 companies and basically indicated whether or not they had done business with government. It concluded:
In light of this data, continuing to claim that Silicon Valley has abandoned Washington would be disingenuous — even if one technically excluded Microsoft, Amazon, and IBM.
Now, I don’t think the conclusion is necessarily wrong. Silicon Valley did not completely abandon national security. But certainly it did when compared to its history. I think the point of the matter is that DoD needs to increase its ability to do business with tech companies. The divide in my mind isn’t so much one of tech company patriotism as it is economics. Rounding errors in revenue aren’t going to move the needle for many tech companies to go through the pain of winning sizable government work.
It’s not clear why the author did not report how much government funding each company won, and how that compared to their total revenue. For example, a cursory search of “Amazon” and “AWS” in USASpending only showed $16 million in FY 2020 and less in prior years. That might be low due to non conformity in the name and because intelligence agencies don’t report their data. For Microsoft, which received between $100 million and $500 million annually, the 2019 obligations don’t even touch one-half of one percent of revenues!
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