The lede: When Washington wants to look serious about spending, it doesn't cancel a submarine. It cancels a help desk. Executive Order 14222 directed agencies to review contracts — starting with IT, consulting, and "non-mission-critical" services — for cost savings, and OMB/GSA have leaned on agencies to trim contractor headcount and consolidate task orders ever since. That's a direct hit on the government-services model: cost-plus, labor-hour, and time-and-materials contracts where the contractor is essentially staffing agency seats. It's a much softer hit on hardware and munitions primes, whose weapons programs carry multi-year appropriations, sunk tooling, and congressional district jobs that make them politically expensive to touch. Same "efficiency" push, opposite stock reaction.
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