Vendor capture and the limits of fast government reform

Source: Niskanen Center
by Matthew Burton

“Last spring, as I was ending my time at the U.S. Treasury as an oversight official monitoring the IRS’s IT modernization efforts, one initiative by the Trump administration gave me hope that progress would be made after I left: trimming federal contracts with large consulting firms. … after decades of dependence on outside firms to do their work for them, many government agencies can no longer even function without them. They are suffering from something called ‘vendor capture,’ and it’s one of the most underexamined barriers to meaningful change in federal operations.” (11/18/25)

https://www.niskanencenter.org/vendor-capture-and-the-limits-of-fast-government-reform