Terminate for Convenience

By Chris Cochran

Boy did I go down a wormhole the other day. Mea culpa.

As a former federal government library manager and Contract Officer’s Representative (COR), under Democrat and Republican administrations, I was responsible for organizing competitive bidding solicitations for information services, products, and specialized research databases; evaluating proposals, and managing contracts once they were in place. The decision to acquire a product was based on historical and current needs of agency staff – my internal clients – and the budget situation. Budgets for those products were submitted annually, approved or denied or adjusted as needed from monies appropriated by Congress and approved by the president, and contracts were reviewed annually to make sure the service provider was delivering the products and services we paid for – that the U.S. taxpayer paid for. Just as an informed public is ideal, an informed government and informed government staff is ideal, too.

On the heels of recent headlines about the Trump administration cancelling the Westlaw legal research service at the SEC, I decided to spend some time scrolling through the list of cancelled contracts by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The individual contracts they’ve terminated so far are mostly organized by agency name, although some contracts have been lumped under “International Assistance Programs” but in fact represent smaller agencies like Millennium Challenge Corporation and Development Finance Corporation – you have to dig a little deeper to find that out.

As a user and manager of information products and research services, I was mostly interested in discovering which media or database subscription contracts had been cancelled by DOGE, looking for any patterns. The three big corporate losers in these actions appear to be

• Politico
• Thomson Reuters, and
• Bloomberg

It’s not hard to read between the lines here, but it’s worth noting that each of these companies owns and produces multiple products – no different from any corporation with a diversified product line. Aside from Politico and its Politico Pro premium content, another Politico-owned resource that has taken a hard hit is the E&E News Service, a respected suite of newswires that focus on energy and the environment – featuring titles such as GreenWire, ClimateWire, and EnergyWire. Politico purchased the E&E service in late 2020, no doubt because it was a well-known, respected, and successful operation. But a climate and environment focus has sealed its fate in the current administration.

In some niche legal reporting last month much was made of the SEC cancelling its Westlaw contract. That’s a specialized legal database ultimately owned by Thomson Reuters, but the Reuters name is apparently verboten in this administration no matter the product produced. Westlaw compiles and aggregates court documents, case law, legislation, regulations – the whole legal gamut – and creates analytics of these activities (its competitor, Lexis, does a similar thing, but there are different product lines or capabilities in both). I would argue it’s a value-neutral operation. It’s technology. But it’s a product in the diversified Thomson Reuters line, so that means trouble in the current administration. And it’s not just the SEC that has had its Westlaw access cancelled by DOGE. Westlaw subscriptions at the Departments of Defense, USDA, HHS, Labor, and Interior, along with the National Science Foundation, have also been cancelled. Targeted cost savings I guess.

Bloomberg is out of favor, too. Its suite of products, including Bloomberg Government, Bloomberg Law, and the widely-known (at least in financial circles) Bloomberg terminals, are all showing up on the DOGE web site, including about 10 different contracts at the Department of Treasury – a notable string of cuts.

Several New York Times contracts have been cancelled also – of course it’s punitive. In one instance I saw that National News Agency, a DC-based company that delivers print copies of newspapers to government agencies and other corporate entities in the DC area, had a partial contract cancellation – only the New York Times deliveries were cancelled in those contracts (those were in the Department of Treasury).

Some other notable contract cancellations I discovered include:

• Lexis
• The Economist and Economist-owned services
• Financial Times
• Congressional Quarterly (CQ) and even the
• Wall Street Journal

The Executive Office of the President (EOP) (most likely in the EOP Library budget) has also had numerous Politico and E&E News contracts terminated. In most if not all cases, the official reason given for the cancellations is “terminate for convenience” – legalese for the government can do whatever it wants.

And now we see conspiracy theories about how the government, through these contracts, is “subsidizing” media, of any persuasion – ludicrous accusations on their face. But the government makes purchases in the commercial marketplace every day. Is it subsidizing Pilot Pen when it purchases pens for staff to use? Is the government subsidizing Dell or Microsoft when it purchases computers or software? Of course not. The government needs these things, big and small, to operate. It’s not subsidizing anything, but it IS being an active partner in the U.S. economy. And the government really can’t operate in a knowledge vacuum. One group’s savings is another group’s information wasteland. In these particular instances, the “chainsaw approach” to budget cutting masks what’s really going on: punishing information providers that aren’t in favor.