Good morning. Welcome to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. My name is David Burto. I am the Director of our National Security Program on Industry and Resources. With me on the stage here this morning is Jesse Elman, who is a research associate in the program. And he is one of the two people most responsible for the report that you have this morning. I'd also like to welcome our viewers on the web. Thank you for joining us this morning. If you're on the web, you should be able to find on the right-hand side of the page that has the video, the slides that we're going to be using this morning. You can download those slides. If we're true to our notes, we will tell you which slide number we're on so that you can flip through them yourself. For those of you with us in the room here, the report is available. And most of the slides are in the report, you know, a couple of methodological slides and some backup slides we have that are not in the report. The report also should be available for download if you're on the website with us this morning. For those of you in the room, I'd like to remind you to silence your cell phones and other noisy electronic devices. I have duly silenced mine. And for those of you on the web, when we get to the end for questions, I'll give you my email if you want to email questions in, you can do that. For those in the room, we'll follow our normal questions procedure using microphones. I mentioned Jesse Elman. I also want to thank Greg Sanders. He is our research fellow for much of our federal procurement data system work, work on this report. Meredith Boyle for organizing the event this morning. And our interns who are pulling it all off Madison Riley, Ben Chang, Megan Dowdy, and Geneva Smith. Special thanks to the CSIS Homeland Security Encounterterrorism Program, Rob Wise, who is the director of the, I mean, program manager in that program, given us a lot of technical advice. And particular thanks to Stephanie Sanicastro, who has been the head of that program for about a year and a half. Now she is on a well-deserved maternity leave with baby Catherine and husband Rich, who made it home from Afghanistan in time, or just about in time anyway. Is there an hour? That's much more in time. This is the fourth year we've been looking at the Department of Homeland Security contract spending. And in that time, there have been a number of interesting changes inside it. We're going to walk you through our slides this morning. I'm going to break at about the, oh, 15th slide or so for questions. I'm reminded of when I'm lecturing my students. If there are no questions, I have plenty more lecture. So we'll try to break for questions about 15 slides in and return to the material if you want. So let me have the next slide if you would, Jesse. The Department of Homeland Security, of course, was created by statute in late 2002, stood up initially in 2003. So it was already part way through fiscal year 2003 at the beginning. Fiscal year 2004 is the first full year of DHS data, both from an outlays and spending perspective and from a contracts obligation perspective. So we use this slide, if you will, to put it in context. We've got all 10 years of DHS's history up here, and this report will focus, the report focuses on all 10 years. Our conversation this morning, though, will probably focus primarily on the last year, the impact of sequester year, if you will, because that's of the most interest, both from the point of view of historically what happened and also to begin to answer to question what's going to happen in 14, what's going to happen in 15 and 16. So the historical record from 10 years back is not necessarily a predictor of the future, if you will. This slide gives you the context for overall DHS spending. Each of the bars has four elements to it. The bottom is contract obligations. We're on the you've already moved past the methodology slide. That's because actually I have slides on both sides of my paper, and I was skipping over the methodology slide. But we're going to come back to methodology if we need to. I'll mention a couple of things along the way. This slide is converted to constant dollars in FY $13. So if you look back at previous years, you won't recognize the numbers at all. That's not what the numbers look like in those fiscal years, but it gives you a comparison over time, if you will. The bottom we have contract obligations. I would note that the contract obligations in 2013 were the lowest total in DHS since its first year, since 2004. It's the fewest dollars obligated under contract since the department was first stood up. The second is a category that we've broken out this year for the first time, and that's grant award data. Jesse, you might say a little bit about where we get our grant data and some of the problems that we found there. We get our grant data from the Federal Assistance Award data system, which is similar to where we get our contract data, the Federal Procurement Data System. The Federal Assistance Award data system, or FADS, is a relatively immature database relative to FPDS. And you'll see that when we get to that data in that we've encountered significant issues with data fields not properly filled in, data fields not filled in at all, significant amounts of grant awards that we know should be in the database that are not in the database. And so we tried to do with this data is not so much analyze trends. It's just set a baseline and identify issues that we think can be correctly going forward to improve the data. What we found, especially with FPDS, is as the database is used more, the data tends to improve, and we hope that's going to be the case with the grants data. For example, with the Federal Procurement Data System, beginning with this administration, they actually started tracking and reporting using numbers in the Federal Procurement Data System as a means of OMB evaluating agency performance against some of the President's guidance, if you will. It's remarkable how much better data get when, in fact, they're being paid attention to by the chain of command and we expect to see a similar dynamic coming out of FADS going forward, if you will. So that's our grant data, and that's the second element of it. We then break down, again, this year for the first time, noncontract outlays into two categories, FEMA and non-FEMA. So you have the marvelous title of the third element of this bar of non-FEMA, noncontract, non-grant outlays. What that means is all the dollars that DHS spent that was not on a grant, not on a contract, and not spent by FEMA. And then we break out FEMA separately because by and large, the biggest swings of difference year to year in DHS spending is in FEMA, and of course it's obviously driven by major natural disasters and FEMA's response to those disasters. From a sequester year point of view, you'll notice that you won't pick it up exactly on this chart, but you'll see the differences at the bottom, if you will, of what happened between 2012, the last year before sequester, and 2013, the impact of sequester. What we had for contract obligations is a decline of about 5 percent between fiscal year 12 and fiscal year 13. And these are obligations, not outlays, so obviously outlays lag a little bit from obligations. For grant awards, they were actually up 6 percent between 12 and 13. So sequester impact was negative there, but some of the grant awards are actually tied to sandy, so that's not a surprise. For FEMA outlays, they were actually up 227 percent between 12 and 13. That's almost all due to, was it called winter storm sandy or something by the time it actually got labeled, if you will. I think of it as a hurricane. And non-FEMA, non-contract, non-grant outlays down 4 percent. That's roughly equal to what the sequester share would be. And as you know, the guidance for a sequester was everybody pays their fair share, and so by and large, that's what you see outside of that. It's interesting because non-contract outlays that are not in FEMA, if you will, have been fairly stable since 2009, swinging only about 6 or 8 or 10 percent per year across the board year over year, if you will, so they've been relatively stable there. Jesse, you want to add anything on that? The one interesting thing to note, and which was a little bit unexpected when we first approached this data, if you look in 2005 and 2006, when you see the impact of Hurricane Ivan and Hurricane Katrina, you not only see a big jump in FEMA outlays, you also see large jumps in both contracts and grants. But if you look between 2012 and 2013, where you see the impact of Hurricane Sandy, you see the big jump in FEMA outlays, but you don't see the same kind of increase in contracts or grants. Part of this may be just the differences in the kind of impact you saw between Ivan and Katrina and Sandy, but we think partly this reflects a slightly differing approach to how FEMA approaches disaster response, less through contracts and grants, or at least less through direct contracts and grants administered and funded by FEMA, and more through direct aid. We suspect some of this is direct aid to states which then contract out. We suspect some of this is money transferred to other agencies like DoD, specifically the Army Corps of Engineers, some of which is then contracted out. But DHS is not doing the same level of disaster response contracting for Sandy in recent years as you saw in the wake of Ivan and Katrina. One of the things I should note about data in the Federal Procurement Data System is it doesn't give us the source of funding, if you will. So appropriated dollars that are in the regular appropriations for DHS are joined together with appropriated dollars from emergency supplementals, which of course tend to be the source of funding for hurricane relief, and the FPDS itself does not separate those. There are beginnings of some new data that does track to appropriations.  Let me go to slide four then, Jesse, if you would. This next set of slides focuses now purely on contract obligations. So that's basically what we're going to focus on for the next six or eight slides, if you will. We array DHS data by five major components, the Customs and Border Protection, the U.S. Coast Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and TSA, as well as something called the Office of Procurement Operations, which is a nice lumping of essentially the science and technology contracts and IT contracts across DHS. And then we have a fairly decent chunk, which we call other, which is all the other little pieces of DHS lumped together, Secret Service, et cetera. So this chart gives you the breakdown by those five components plus Office of Procurement Operations and other. One thing to note here in the year-to-year changes, and particularly the sequester impact changes, is the impact of a single contract on DHS. So the total contract obligation in DHS, just under $13 billion for the year, down from a high of around $15 billion, a single $500 million award for a Coast Guard cutter is a big chunk. It actually moves the needle on a number of categories, if you will. So this particular year, for instance, where Coast Guard is actually up in sequester year, it's up because of a cutter, which is about a $500 million contract, a little under $500 million in the actual contract, but total obligations are there. So that one swing, if you will, makes a fairly substantial difference. But look at the sequester impact from some of the others. So all of DHS is down about 3 percent in contract obligations for the sequester year. If you took the cutter out of the baseline, in other words, if the cutter had not occurred in the sequester year, it's down about 5.5 percent. That's kind of our benchmark over the next few charts of comparing relative impact from sequester year against aggregate impact of sequester year. So with that in mind, Coast Guard is actually up. FEMA is actually up, not surprised. That's a sandy impact. Immigrations is down by 13 percent, so that's more than triple what the fair share of sequester impact would be. This is contract obligations. TSA down 15 percent, and Customs and Border Protection roughly average with sequester. So what you see is the sequestration impact is not evenly distributed, at least in terms of contracts across the components of DHS. In fact, the distribution is quite varied, if you will. Jesse, you want to add anything on this? Two brief methodological notes. One, you may notice that in 2010 FEMA contract obligations look particularly low. That's because FEMA had an $800 million de-obligation in that year of prior year disaster relief contracts. We haven't been able to track down, FPDS does not give us the visibility to track down what years that money comes from. We suspect it's related to hurricanes Ivan and Katrina, primarily Katrina. The other thing to note with this chart and the charts going forward, you'll notice that our main number is, for overall DHS, is negative 3 percent. You may have noticed on the context chart that it was negative 4 percent. That's just a difference of how we look at contracts. The initial chart looks at ads in contracts funded by DHS, but administered by everywhere else. For all of our other charts, we're only looking at contracts that are actually administered by DHS. So from the point of view of Department of Homeland Security is your customer market. This is the relevant portion, if you will. This is funded by DHS, administered by DHS, not funds from elsewhere. So let's look at contract obligations by area. This is slide 5 if you're following along on the web, if you will. We break down our contract obligations in a way that's slightly different than the Federal Procurement Data System. The Federal Procurement Data System basically categorizes all contracts as either products or services. We break out services by our own definitions of categories, if you will. First, we lump R&D together separately. And for many areas, we like to compare products and R&D because R&D is more of an investment than it is a service in terms of where the government gains its benefits, if you will. And then inside the remainder of the services, we have professional administrative and management services called PAMS on this chart. We have equipment-related services, ERS. We have facilities-related services and construction, that's FRS. And we have medical and ICT, which is Information and Communications Technology. So this slide gives you those seven areas, if you will, and allows you to look at the breakdown both over time by actual dollars and then the relative changes in FY13 as a result of sequestration impact. One of the relative constants is that DHS back to 2008 has been roughly $3 in services spending contract obligations for every dollar in products. And that's been almost a constant. It's ranged from like 77 to 22 percent to 75 to 25 percent. And since R&D is only about 3 percent, it roughly keeps that same even if you take R&D out of the picture, if you will. So if you're in the product business, DHS is not exactly your area of future market growth, if you will. Within that, though, the sequester year impact was not nearly as stable. What you saw was that equipment-related services, facilities-related services, Information and Communications Technology-related services were all down at more than twice the average of the sequester decline. So in terms of overall market share, all of those services areas declined considerably. And then by component it varies a whole lot as well. For instance, some of the components professional administrative and management services actually went up during the sequester year. Others went down considerably. Some of this had to do, for instance, in the case of Coast Guard, it appears that Congress didn't appropriate exactly all the funding they needed for the cutter. So they had to go find that money elsewhere. And as a result, contract spending on other contracts went down inside the Coast Guard, and you can sort of see the effect of that. Jesse, you want to add anything to that? Primarily here, you'll see in the next few slides that there's an issue of data labeling. That isn't really an issue here because we go off of government product and service codes. Also, these categories are crosswalkable with government categories. DoD has their own categories. DHS, I believe, has their own system of categorization. We can crosswalk with the government classification of products and services. We essentially group these into categories we think make sense from an analytical point of view to reveal trends that in certain segments of the market. Now we want to look at competition. So let's look at slide 6. This is not in your report. For those of you who do your own FPDS analysis, we provide you the crosswalk from the 17 categories of competition that the federal procurement data system allows entry into to the four categories that we use for our reporting purposes, if you will. Those four categories are competitive solicitation with multiple offers, and we sometimes break that down into two, three, or four, or five, or more. Competitive solicitations with a single offer, and we believe that frequently the soliciting organization has a pretty good idea that they're only going to get a single offer when they do a competitive solicitation that has a single bid. Then we do the sole source awards, which are any competitions or any contract that are entered using one of the exceptions for competition under the Competition and Contracting Act. And then finally we have what we call unlabeled, which basically means confusing entries that are inconsistent with one another. For instance, a competitive solicitation that was awarded but had no bids from our perspective. That's a little bit of a non-sequitur, so we call that category. Unlabeled, what it really is, is badly mislabeled, if you will. So this is our crosswalk. Let's go to the next slide and let's look at what the results are there. So now I'm on slide 7. For those of you who have the slide deck at home, across DHS, keep in mind, we've got roughly a 3% decline in contract obligations, discounting for the CUTR award about a 5.5% decline. So that's kind of your benchmark, if you will, in terms of competition. What we saw in sequester year was a very significant jump in sole source awards, a 15% growth in a single year as contract obligations were actually declining. In fact, sole source awards in DHS have gone from about 1 7th of total contract obligations back in 2009 to 2 7th of total contract obligations in 2013. However, that was done in part because of a decline in competition with a single offer. And we believe there's actually a correlation there because in an awful lot of times you actually know you're only going to get one bid. If you wanted to go to the trouble of a sole source justification for a sole source award, you probably have the basis for doing so under a CECA exception. And what looks like probably happened in DHS in 2013 is in fact a recognition of that and a movement in that direction, if you will. Because if you look at the total award combination, if you will, of no competition of sole source awards and competition with a single offer, it was 44% of total contract obligations back in 2009, those two categories together, 45% of total contract obligations in 2013. So there's a fair element of stability in that regard, if you will. What we did see the increase, if you will, was in competition with three to four offers where the chart shows 0% difference, but keep in mind overall contract obligations down about 5.5%. So what you saw, what you would expect to see as a result of sequestration is in fact more competition in the areas where competition was already in place. And that's exactly what you end up seeing in this area here. In places where in fact there's only a single source, you see less competition under sequestration. Jesse, you want to add anything? You'll notice the bottom bar for unlabeled. Back in 2009, that was almost $2.7 billion, which was 15% or 17% of total DHS contract obligations. We couldn't identify the degree of competition because the data labeling was not there. They've made significant strides to that effect. It's down to less than 2%. What we've seen is what we suspect is that as unlabeled has gone down, there have been increases both in no competition and competition with 5 plus offers. This is a bit anomalous in most agencies we've looked at when the data labeling has improved for competition. Just no competition has increases kind of concurrently. So what we suspect is that the unlabeled was masking both some no competition and some highly competitive contract awards, oddly enough. The other thing to note here is that this is not a coincidence. The Chief Procurement Officer, Nick Nyack at DHS, has a team that looks at the DHS entries every single day. They pull the FPDS entries from DHS every single day, looks at them over a certain threshold to see if something looks off, some data is mislabeled. We suspect as a result of this, they've made very significant strides in the quality of their data entry. Thank you, Jesse. It's worth pointing out we've seen tremendous results from that in our data as we've watched over the last few years. Nick Nyack and his team deserve a big shout out in that regard. Let's go to slide 8 now. This is another methodological piece. If you will, you won't find it in your report. This basically walks you through the 17 different FPDS categories of what we call pricing mechanism to the five categories that we use, fixed price, cost reimbursable, time and materials, combination and unlabeled. Now, a word of caution here. Combination in the guidance for the Federal Procurement Data System entry. And keep in mind every one of these 700,000 contract actions a year being entered by a human being sitting down at a computer entering data into the Federal Procurement Data System. Basically what combination means is you have a combination of contract line item numbers of cleanse, some of which are fixed price in their basis and some of which are cost reimbursable. And it's too hard for the interurer to determine which of the two categories they should be put into. That doesn't mean that in the fixed price category there aren't some contracts with cleanse that are in fact on a cost reimbursable basis or that in the cost reimbursable category there aren't some cleanse that are fixed price. It's the predominance of the expected obligations that drive this, if you will. But we believe that over time these differences tend to mask themselves from trend analysis point of view so they don't actually skew the trend data one way or the other. Let's go then to slide 11. I'm sorry. Slide 9, right? So if you look then at this basis you'll see, and again using the sequester year of a minus 3% as your benchmark, fixed price contracts dramatically increased as a percentage of total DHS spending in the sequester year. Up 5% in terms of contract obligations between 2012 and 2013 as overall contract obligations were declining 3%. Cost reimbursable down 18% in that time period. Time in materials down 10%. This indicates to us a very serious push for fixed price contracting across DHS. The anecdotes that we've heard from the companies in the business certainly reinforce that if you will. A lot more focus on fixed price contracts as part of this. Pretty dramatic reduction in the other categories but they're so small that they don't even show up on the bar graph. So the 56% reduction in combination is rounds off to not much difference one way or the other if you will. We also look at spending or contract spending by contract vehicle. Slide 10 if you will. And here we break down into a variety of categories. The bottom one with a blue part with the 2.7 billion is definitive contracts. That was up 3% year over year. However, keep in mind there's a $500 million contract for a cutter in there and so that skews that number if you will. Purchase orders which is only down to about $300 million now declined by 10% over the year. Single award IDCs up 3% and this is actually a huge chunk of DHS spending across all components now. Multiple award IDCs down considerably. Now we think this is actually the result of obviously thousands of task orders being issued on these IDC contracts and so there's no one particular set of actions that drives these numbers if you will. And significantly less spending now on the Federal Supply Schedule down from $4 billion 3 years ago to $3 billion last year. Jesse you want to add anything on this? With both this chart and the last chart you again see the improvements in data quality and the decline in the unlabeled which were at the bottom. One note on the last chart the contract pricing mechanism chart. The decline in the unlabeled was concurrent with a rise in fixed price contracting. We suspect that the unlabeled and the combination were masking the degree to which there was fixed price contracting within DHS. Also note that the increase in fixed price in 2013 a lot of the cutter was awarded under a fixed price incentive fee contract so part of that increase was due to the fact that you had that $500 million contract for the cutter. Thanks. Let's go to slide 11 now. We also break out our data by contract size because and we actually have in the backup material some interesting analysis of the levels of competition based upon contract size and we may bring that up before we finish here this morning. Starting at the bottom so we've got basically the six categories of contracts are under $250,000 and keep in mind Federal procurement data system captures theoretically every contract action of $2,500 or more. So this is about $1 billion in FY13 down about 10% year over year so slightly bigger than average about double the average of what the sequester impact would be. Contracts between $250,000 and a million down about 10% roughly its fair share of sequester impact. Similarly with contracts between $1 million and $25 million which is half of total DHS contract obligations fall into contracts of that size, $1 million to $25 million and that spread almost equally across all DHS components in terms of the volume of contract actions of that size. About $3 billion in the $25 million to $100 million category and this actually was flat year over year which basically indicates that it did very well under sequester impact with no negative impact at all. And then the $100 million to $500 million range substantial drop, 29% drop year over year. This is about three or four contracts is all it takes to create that level of fall if you will. And then of course you can see on the top the orange Coast Guard Cutter in 2011 and the orange Coast Guard Cutter in 2013. Those are your only greater than $500 million contracts since Hurricane Katrina back in 2006 if you will. We then look at vendor size, slide 12 if you will. We break down the size of vendor into three basic categories. One is we call small and that's any company that the data are entered into the Federal Procurement Data System using a small business set aside category if you will. We track this by DUNS codes and so we actually have cases of some vendors hundreds of DUNS codes that we sort out and align with the company if you will. We define large as any company the amalgamation of which all of their revenue from all sources government, non-government, domestic and international is $3 billion a year or more. And then we define medium as everything in between. This is a little bit misleading because a chunk of your medium-sized companies are those that have just graduated from small business category and you're clearly not a billion-dollar a year company. Others are in that $500 million a year, $1 billion a year, $1.5 billion a year range and they're clearly a very different type of company especially in a DHS market than a company that's just graduated from small business. We're wrestling with that methodologically in terms of how we might proceed going forward but our trend analysis for years has been into these categories. And then just for convenience sake we break out what we have been calling the Big Six. These are your largest Federal contractors if you will Lockheed Martin General Dynamics, Boeing Northrop Grumman Raytheon and BAE Systems. And so we break those down. Even inside the Department of Homeland Security they have a non-trivial portion of the total contract spend. It's interesting what happened in sequester year though. Small businesses essentially stable a decline of 3 percent which is roughly their share of a 3 percent overall decline. Medium business actually gained a bit up 1 percent for the year. So a slight improvement in the position overall of medium-sized businesses even as sequester spending was down 3 percent. Large businesses actually also did a little better than average with a decline of only 1 percent. And the biggest impact was in the Big Six where they lost 1 fourth of their dollar value if you will in FY13 as a result of the sequester. I think if you went back one chart Jesse, you'd see probably a fairly high degree of correlation between that significant drop in the $100 million to $500 million contract range on this slide and go forward and the reduction in in fact the share of the Big Six. I don't think we've done the contract by contract comparison but I suspect you'd see a high correlation between those two going forward. So let's look at the vendors now. I should add here from a physiological point of view the Federal Procurement Data System lists only prime contract dollars. We do not have good public data that allows us to break out subcontract dollars. And so these numbers do not match what companies report as revenue. In fact they don't even come close to what companies report as revenue. They are however what the public data says the prime contract dollar value obligations were for the top 20 DHS vendors. We've got actually 4 sets of data here. On the left hand side we have the top 20 vendors in 2008 ranked 1 through 20 and then next to it we show their dollar obligations in 2013 constant dollars. Then we also show their 2007 ranks. So you can see the change year over year between 7 and 8. Then on the right hand side we have the top 20 vendors in 2013 and we show the 2012 rank and the amounts associated with those as well. I'll turn to some of my notes on this chart. One interesting point of course the companies do change and they change in part due to the types of contracts being awarded. When you're only awarded between 12 and 15 billion a year a single large contract can move you up or down this list fairly rapidly if you will. The second thing you would see particularly if you had for instance the 2006 list is you see a huge impact from contracts as a result of Hurricane Katrina. Those are all gone and you don't really see much of a Sandy impact in the 2013 list or Sandy impact in changes from 12 to 13. This reflects what Jesse pointed out earlier is that the response to Hurricane Sandy was largely not in the form of contracts. It was much more in the form of direct spending or of money transferred to other agencies. What you do see though is that the share of the top 5 in 2008 was about 43 percent that 2.441 billion dollars of their obligations in 2008 was about 43 percent of total DHS spending. By 2013, I'm sorry, that's the share of the top 20. So the top 5 share of the top 20 not of total DHS spending. By 2013 the top 5 actually had 51 percent of the top 20 total contract obligations. So you do see a bit more of a concentration amongst those top 5. I would note, however, that the top 5 have all changed in that period of time. And so I would read too much into that if you will. The other thing is the overall share of DHS contract obligations that are gathered by these top 20. It was 37 percent in 2008. It's 36 percent in 2013. That looks like for the point of view of the market a fairly stable and competitive market going forward if you will. Let's turn now to slide 14 and look at grants.  So what we've done here, all the FADS database uses the catalog of Federal Direct Assistance assignments for program titles and program numbers. We've taken each of the grant programs within DHS and assigned them into purpose categories with the exception of the Homeland Security Grant Program, which is a grouping of several large grant programs within DHS. That gets its own category because it's so much money. We've grouped them into counterterrorism and infrastructure security, disaster preparedness, disaster response, transportation security, and other which is just a catch-all for a few small programs. One thing to note here is that several of these programs have elements within them that may cross over into two or more of these categories but the FADS database doesn't give us any visibility beyond the top level program of any sub programs within that grant program. So we've done our best to assign these programs to one of these categories based on what we felt investigating it was the main purpose of that grant. Be aware though that there is some money that could be classified into two or more of these categories. What you do see here and the one thing that we were hesitant to do trend analysis there are some very serious data gaps, the ones we identified primarily with the Homeland Security Grant Program. You'll notice that in 2010 the Homeland Security Grant Program disappears. That's not because there was no money. There was $1.8 billion in awards for the Homeland Security Grant Program in 2010. In FADS there was negative $1 million in awards. We have no indication that they stopped awarding money under this program in 2010. The data is just missing from the database. Similarly in 2012 and 2013 about half of the awards under the Homeland Security Grant Program about 300 million to 500 million each year are just missing from the database. Based on this we're hesitant to do any sort of trend analysis because we're just not confident that the data in the database is robust and complete. But what we are doing is using this as a baseline to go forward to A track improvements in the data and B just see kind of where the money is going. The one thing you will see is the vast majority of grants within DHS do go to disaster response in one form or another. I should note that DHS is fully aware of this. They're working on it and we expect that by the time we stand up in front of you next year with our DHS contract trends report this will have been fixed at least to the point where we've got numbers that seem to match reality. So we're excited about that possibility. The things we get excited about here at CSIS are somewhat small in nature sometimes when it comes to contract and grant data. Nonetheless what this does is allows us to get a picture first of how much money is going into these grant programs and they've changed dramatically over time and Congress continues to fiddle with the boundaries of the programs and their purposes if you will. And if we look at slide 15 you'll see who's getting them. So if you're in the business of working for a state or local government in a disaster area you're excited to see these numbers. If you're actually trying to pursue contracts these are pretty meaningless to you because although almost all of these recipients then turn around and spend the money a good chunk of this money is spent under contracts. So as a secondary market for businesses it's a very large market if you will but it's not a very concentrated market, it's not a very centralized market and it's not a very market and not a market that you can target very well from Washington. Let me pause there.  Yeah this looks like a suitably good place to pause. We do have some additional material we could walk you through in terms of level of competition by component in terms of contract size by DHS component and competition by contract size and size of vendor. But let me pause there and invite questions if you will. If you're in the room you want to ask a question just raise your hand. One of our staff will bring you a microphone and you would in fact speak into the microphone, identify yourself and your affiliation and then ask your question and we'll do our best to respond to it. Anybody have a question? If you're watching from the web you can email them to me at dberteu.csis.org and I'll pick the good ones and I like questions by email because I can filter them a little better than questions from the room. Let's start on the back here if you would Geneva. How are you doing? I'm at the Homeland Security Studies and Analysis Institute. It's a federally funded research and development center. So my question is did you consider FFRDCs in your data collection? Thank you. I do FFRDCs if I recall correctly and Greg please correct me if I'm wrong on this would show up in our list of top vendors if they made it into the top 20. We don't break out that data separately but the FEDS data with some work would theoretically allow us to identify contracts going to the FFRDCs. In addition we have looked over time at the award there and the competition contracting exception of course is pretty diligently followed in that regard. That's not only true for DHSSAI but for FFRDCs across government contracting. But it's probably not worth breaking out separately because it's not a significant enough portion that it skews the rest of the data I don't think. There's often a debate as to whether spending with FFRDCs federally funded R&D centers should somehow be spent in open competition with other sources as well. Every study that I've been on that looks at that finds a very strong, valid area if you will of reason to maintain separate federally funded R&D centers and other similar entities across the government. The issues are all on the boundaries and the edges rather than on the core question if you will. Other questions in the room? My name is Joe Karahi. I am a consultant with McConnell International Consulting on DHS Affairs and the DHS alumni. I was wondering if you were able to look at the effect of the significant delays to the EGLE II competition in DHS contracting and how it might have affected dollars spent in one year or another and perhaps how it led to an increase in no competition activities. I think you mentioned that you only looked at DHS contracts that were administered by DHS and not other parts of the government and I think there was a significant movement away from DHS contracting to other parts of the government with the delay in EGLE II. I think you are absolutely right. There certainly was evidence of that in a lot of the stories that were in the trade press at the time. The difficulty of tracking that in the Federal Procurement Data System is often it will not have the actual contract that was used if you will. You can track back by contract number but the transactions if you will of going from an individual contract inside FPDS back to the original contract and particular decisions that were made to use that as opposed to a different one. I think it is probably a little bit beyond our analytical reach with the staff and the time that we have. But I think it is a very valid question and one of the interesting dynamics particularly in the services contract business is the individual impacts that particular decisions are having in terms of either delays or decisions to use other vehicles if you will. I think that is a question we will take and look at for our next version. I should also point out that we will have significant additional data posted on our website if you will following the release of this. And our plan this year is to update that regularly as the year goes along rather than wait. The cycle time for data, the fiscal year starts October 1st. Typically the Federal Procurement Data System updates for the previous fiscal year are relatively mature by about the end of the calendar year so about a three month lag time and we start doing our analysis if you will. There is one exception to that the Defense Department doesn't actually even begin it has its data internally but it doesn't begin making the data publicly available until after 90 days and that lags behind a little bit if you will. But inside the Federal Procurement Data System there is constant change of data entry and constant updates if you will. For instance, the Coast Guard Cutter contract that we talked about here when we initially began doing our analysis in February was listed as a contract for radio equipment. I am delighted that they are buying radios but it was hard for me to see $500 million worth in a single year. It turns out it is a radio equipped platform that the $500 million contract was for. We watched that closely but I think your question about basically the delay in the EGLE award is a valid question. I am not sure we can get at it but we will take a look at that. Let me turn to a couple of the charts that I think I want to go through here very quickly in terms of the additional breakdown Jesse if you could flip through this. These are not in your report but they are in the charts I believe that we posted on the Web. So what we have is contract obligations, component by level of competition if you will. The colors if you will, the darker red is no competition and the darker blue is three or more offers. So what that allows you to do is to see the two ends if you will of competitive environment. That is sole source awards and multiple offers, three or more offers if you will. What you see with the Coast Guard is in fact a dominance of those two categories. There is either a lot of competition in terms of the total percentage of money being spent, roughly 40% in 2013, or there isn't any competition at all. Again roughly 40% of contract obligations is non-competitive in the Coast Guard. Much of that is in fact the cutter. The next slide, slide 20. In FEMA you see a categorization I think that you will see over and over again if you will which is again in the middle you see single offer and sole source awards. At the very bottom two offers and at the very top three or more offers. Next slide. You see somewhat of a parallel dynamics with immigration. You see a very substantial amount, over 50% of contract obligations by ICE were three or more offers. This is a highly competitive environment and has skyrocketed in the last three years in terms of immigration's customer enforcement. I have to reflect back. I think this is about a little under $2 billion total contract obligations. So it is a very competitive environment if you will. The next slide. TSA equally a very competitive environment. Dramatic increase in competitive solicitations with three or more offers. It is now over 50% of TSA is slightly more than a billion and a half dollars if you will. And in the Office of Procurement Operations which again is S&T and IT contracts again you are over 40% in terms of competitive environment. So once you get away from the big sole source contract awards in CBP which are actually not large. There is a lot of small sole source awards in CBP and the large sole source awards in Coast Guard you see a very very competitive environment at the component level across DHS similar with the other DHS category in slide 24. Looking at the size of contract by component. Again these are in the order I think I am on slide 26 here. CBP contract obligations by size of contract. You see the vast majority of CBP contracts are in the million to $25 million range roughly $1 billion a year and in the $25 to $100 million range and since 2009 almost no contracts over $100 billion. I should note that CBP has never awarded a contract to any of the firms that we labeled as big six in our chart of the major government contractors. Coast Guard again huge chunk in the million to $25 million range. The larger contracts tend to be driven by individual programs and individual years in which they are spent. Next slide, slide 28. FEMA by and large is in the categories of the 1 to $25 million range keeping in mind that FEMA contracts are down considerably and much of FEMA's response to Hurricane Sandy was in direct spending. Next Immigrations again the vast majority in the 1 to $25 million contract range and if you go back and compare this you will find that the levels of competition that is the three or more competitive solicitations or competitive offers against solicitations are by and large in this $25 million contract range similarly with TSA on slide 30. In fact, I think you can skip past the next couple because they are pretty much the same. Now we look at level of competition by size of contract. I am on slide 34 for those of you following along at home and not necessarily at home. You are probably in your office. I suspect you put on a coat and tie to watch us this morning. If you look at level of competition for contracts under $250,000 you see the pattern that we have seen elsewhere. Either a lot of competition that is three or more offers and over 30% of total contract obligations in this category or in that or in fact a very large number of contracts with either a single offer or a sole source award in the 20 to 30% range if you will. That is for small contracts for the $250,000 to $1 million which is slide 35. You see the same pattern if you will. Single largest share is in competition with three or more offers and the smallest share is in competition with in fact only two offers with the sole source of the single offer in between. Similarly for contracts $1 to $25 million on slide 36 for contracts of $25 to $100 million on slide 37. This was actually a bit of a surprise to me because I expected to see a difference based on the size of the contract in terms of the level of competition. Where it begins to break down is obviously when you get to the really large contracts of $100 million or more where a single contract award or a single contract that has only two bidders can skew the data considerably if you will and on the level of competition for contracts over $500 million obviously some years they are none and other years they are a single source award. So that is almost not worth the chart but in the interest of completion we look forward. Then we look at size of contract by size of vendor so this is where you are going after if you are in the business if you will. I am on slide 41. This is a little tough to read from where you are because of the changes in colors and the scale if you will. By and large what you see is a pretty high correlation between small businesses tend to dominate the contracts of under $1 million. I have the largest share roughly 50% of all those contract obligations are going to small set-aside businesses. In the $1 to $25 million range you see essentially a really large competition or share between small businesses and medium size businesses and it isn't until you get to the contracts of $25 million or more that large businesses begin to dominate in terms of share. None of that is counterintuitive and in fact is exactly what you would expect. There is not necessarily any policy guidance in that regard but it is interesting to see the data by and large support that if you will. Then we look at level of competition by size of vendor. I am on slide 43 here and as you can see more than half of all contracts awarded to small businesses have three or more bids. Very competitive environment. Next slide. For medium size businesses it is equally competitive but only in the last couple of years. It has been a dramatic increase in terms of competitive solicitations with three or more offers. It is now over half of total contracts obligated to medium size businesses. Then on slide 45 large businesses here you have a much bigger dominance of in fact sole source offers. Nearly 40% of all contract obligations to large businesses are sole source awards and another 15% are single offer competitions if you will. And a little bit of a decline in terms of competition both with two offers and with three or more offers for large businesses. And then the Big Six, the largest government contractors if you will shows actually a surprisingly competitive environment well over half of dollars awarded to the Big Six or awarded with two or more offers. And that was a bit of a surprise to me. This is not dominated by sole source obligations. So that is a quick tour through the kinds of data that you will see not necessarily in the report but that you will see in additional charts and data on the website if you will and we can break that down. We are happy to not only take questions now but as you go through the data we are happy to take your emails and questions on what is inside here as well and we wish you all great success in increasing your share of this declining market. Any other questions or comments? Make sure I have none on the web and we have a couple but I think we have already covered one of them and the other I will answer separately offline. Thank you very much for joining us this morning.


is the Fableman's movie, A True Story. We're gonna explore that today with our movie guru, aficionado reviewer person, Steve Gutman, who is a lawyer and who really likes movies and writes a blog about it, as a matter of fact. Welcome to your show, Steve. Well, thank you. Thank you. So today, we're gonna do the Fableman's and it's very interesting that they chose the Fableman's as the name. That's a fictitious name, but it sounds a lot like Spielberg, doesn't it? Spiel, Biel, Tell a Story, Fableman's, Fable, Tell a Fable. Okay. Yeah, that's, I think the heart of this is as you watch this movie, you keep thinking about the fact, is this a true or is it not true? To what degree is it autobiography and to what degree is it just simply an interesting story being told by an excellent filmmaker? That keeps coming up as you watch the film. The movie itself can be divided into three parts. You have the opening segment as a young child, then you have his teenage years and then you have the third segment, which is very different when he's actually in the family moves to Northern California and then his high school with a little bit of a postscript in terms of a interview with John Ford and questions come up that Spielberg really have that interview with John Ford. So you've got some very interesting elements that are occurring as this movie unfolds. It opens with, well, the Spielberg character's name is Sammy in the movie. And in the opening sequence, the camera is focused on Sammy as his parents are talking to him, getting him to be relaxed as they stand in line to go see of all things a movie. The movie is The Greatest Show on Earth, which was a Cecil DeMille film. Best as I can remember, it's been decades since I saw that film. I wasn't particularly impressed by that particular film, but they're talking to him, trying to make him calm. It's real clear Sammy was not his idea to go go see a movie. But in the movie, there's a train wreck, am I right? And he comes onto that. That's what actually triggers this after the opening sequence and then, and they show the train wreck scene from the Cecil DeMille film. Then the next scene is back at his home, at their home in New Jersey. And the time is December of 1952. And it's not real clear as to exactly how old Sammy is when they're, in terms of this particular sequence, but based on things you learn, particularly back when you get to the high school, it's presumed these would be six years old at the time he's seen this particular person. That sounds like the same age that Spielberg would have been. When Spielberg had a promotional panel on this, which was when it came out, which is a few months ago, he said he was 75 then. So that makes sense. Yeah, yeah. They give the date of when he's in line to see the movie, but there's no real comment about age. And you kind of work backwards because at the high school, they say he graduated in 1964 from high school. So using that as the trigger date, you kind of work backwards and you get six. That's probably the age when I first saw my film, my first film. I have no remembrance of what that my first film was, but back then when you went to the movies, you got a film, you got a cartoon, and you got a serial that would bring you back each week because it was ongoing episodes. And interesting enough, I do remember scenes from the serials, I have absolutely no remembrance of any of the movies I would have seen back then. Do you have any idea, Jay, when you first saw a movie? I remember there was a camel in the movie. My uncle took me and my brother, we went together to see this movie with a camel. My brother turned to me and he said, I want a Clark bar, which at the time was using camels to advertise. Oh. It's Clark bars. That's all I remember. Yeah. Yeah.  But as to the incident with the train and the movie, what happens is Spielberg goes to bed, wakes up and then the shouts out that he now knows what he wants as his Hanukkah gift. It's a train set. And the parents get the train set thinking that it was just simply the train themselves and the old Lionel train system, which were fun. I remember having one of those. But instead, it was the crash. It was actually the actual crash that really got Sammy interested in wanting this particular train set. And then the mother knew that it was not gonna be something tolerated in terms of him crashing the trains, because obviously they're not gonna last very, very long. So she suggests that they do one crash and they film it. And that's what they do. And that's actually the trigger point for Spielberg to start his film career was filming this crash scene from the train. So it's a very, very interesting story. Well, the reviews Steve said it was touching and beautiful and the script was beautiful and touching. Did you find it that way? And if so, why? Because it was such a family interaction. It's real clear through this movie because they actually have a very short Hanukkah scene with the gifts and so forth. This is a very middle-class Jewish family living in New Jersey in a very Christian neighborhood. And that is a theme that Spielberg comes back to again, particularly when you get to the last third of the movie. He talks about anti-Semitism and then the connection between his experiences around anti-Semitism in various places they lived and Schindler's List, which was a tremendously powerful statement about the Holocaust. I found it interesting because I thought from looking at Schindler's List that Spielberg was a religious Jewish person and his family was a religious Jewish family. But I suspect that the movie did not depict him as religious. They depicted, however, as part of a Ukrainian family, which I thought was very interesting, especially now. That's really not something that he runs with in terms of anything with Ukraine. But it's real clear that right from the beginning that this is a Jewish family telling a Jewish story. A couple of things really struck me in reading up on this movie. One is, you asked a seminal question, is it true? And I think the answer is, in part, it's semi-autobiographical is what it is. And further, that it was made during COVID. It was made in 2021, I think. And what's interesting about that is that there's a lot of precious movies about people, famous people making movies about their lives in this period, in the COVID period. And you wonder, and of course, some of them are purely autobiographical, documentaries per se and others are semi-autobiographical. But there's a question on whether there's a vanity element here. I guess he decided he wanted to give credit, give some credit to his parents and his home and his family and his youth and all that, but it's his story. That's what it is. I mean, you might find things in there that are fictitious, like the name, for example, and some of the events maybe. But this to me struck me, the question has to be asked, was this precious? Was this his legacy, a statement? He's into legacy. Spielberg did, for example, the Schindler's List movie as a matter of legacy. And a lot of things he's done included elements of his childhood and things he wanted to leave behind for posterity. And I think this has to be especially in that category, don't you think? I'll give you an example of legacy. Yeah, it's his girlfriend say that one of the reasons she enjoyed being with him was because he's a great kisser. Yeah, other than a little pat on the back for himself of being a great kisser, he really didn't need that particular. But the whole scene with the girlfriends, which is what occurs in the latter third, is there's some real question in terms of just how accurate that that is. The interaction was, she tried to convert him to being a Christian. There's a great scene where she has the two of them where they're supposed to breathe in Christ, and it immediately leads to a very passionate sense of kisses between the two of them. So that whole scene. There was a lot of privacy things in there. He talks about his parents and he reveals things that are not necessarily complimentary. In fact, they had a very strange falling out. And years later, I don't know if it was in the movie or not, years later, the husband, Spielberg, I forget his first name, who was a successful tech entrepreneur. Yes, he was a successful tech entrepreneur and he seemed like a nice guy in all this. He found that his wife left him. And as I recall, Spielberg was 19 at the time. That must have been traumatic for him. And later on, he found that the reason that the marriage dissolved was because his mother was having an affair with the father's best friend. That's kind of also traumatic. And what's interesting too, in terms of revealing private things, and I don't know if this came out of the movie or just the reviews, but later on, not too long ago, they reconciled. And it's a really in and out kind of marriage. And that must have been troublesome for him. But at the same time, he revealed a good part of that in the movie. And when one of the reviewer asked him, weren't you concerned you'll be making your parents unhappy? He said something like, no, truth. They're okay with truth. And that's a central thing. It's so interesting that when he speaks of this movie and when he speaks of filmmaking, he's talking about finding and revealing the truth. And yet, movie isn't all true. How about that? How about that? But the particular sequence is actually in the movie where his father asked him to put together a little film on a camping trip that the family had taken together. And as he's putting together the film of the camping, all of a sudden he's noticing that his mother is walking hand in hand away from the group with what is described as Bert's best friend, Bernie. And the two of them are going off. And that scene, Spielberg has been quoted as saying is accurate, that actually is what he saw. At that particular point, he probably was either 17 or 18. He would not have been 19 yet. But I think he was in his senior year in high school when that occurred. And the kids were told apparently that it was the father that wanted the divorce. But in fact, it was the mother who wanted it. And she then went on and married the so-called best best friend and remained married for a number of years. Yeah, until they reconciled. This is a very interesting life story. So one of the things that came out for me, Spielberg, is that his mother was an accomplished concert pianist. Yes. And both parents were accomplished. She was the critical person in terms of letting him find creative ways of doing it. And in terms of letting him find creativity. I think his father wanted him to do something more mundane, but his mother said, no, go for it. Do you want to do film? Do film. And they gave him room, or she gave him room and encouraged him. And I think the message that he's giving is he would not have been a filmmaker and a great filmmaker had it not been for her allowing him to find his passion. And that's very important in terms of telling us what the family dynamic was and suggesting to all families that you can have a Spielberg on your hands if you just let him run. Of course, that isn't necessarily true, but I think one of the elements that I saw in my reading on this is that anyone who is permitted by his family or her family to find his talent can do better, can be another Spielberg. Just let him run, let him go, let him find his talent. And to me, that's a big takeaway from this movie, isn't it? Oh, absolutely. The father viewed the filmmaking as simply a hobby. And it was not something that you could make a career out of. And that is a reoccurring theme throughout the movie. The mother was definitely a very highly skilled pianist. And actually, well, in Phoenix, apparently it appeared on TV a few times with concerts and so forth that Spielberg kind of hints at. But she clearly has some mental health issues and there's some real problems. What's also interesting throughout the movie, neither, even though it starts from when he's six and goes up through about the age of 20, the parents don't age. They look exactly the same at the end of the movie as what they look like right at the beginning. Well, I'm sure there's a meaning in that, don't you think? He was trying to tell us something by not having the mage. He had complete control over the environment to this movie. And that I suppose was a message to us that in his mind's eye, you used the term remembrance a little while ago and I'm reminded of Marcel Proust, one of my favorite French authors who wrote Remembrance of Things Past, Ray Sherstiton Perdue. And it talks about the importance of your childhood and how you need to look back at it. You cannot appreciate your life yourself, your accomplishments, your, the definition of you without looking at your childhood. So Spielberg looks at his childhood and he sees his parents frozen in amber. They were always lost. That's, isn't that interesting? That's the way he sees them. So he lets them be ageless. Yeah, and they clearly are, they clearly are. But what's, the film takes on a whole different texture in that last third when they moved into early California. There may have been some anti-Semitism that he was running into in Phoenix where the family, the film starts in New Jersey. Dad get, father gets promotions, get gets new jobs, goes to work for GE. They moved to Phoenix. Then there's a whole series of interactions that occur there. And then he gets a job at IBM and they moved to Northern California. It's when they move up to Northern California that suddenly the anti-Semitism just becomes front and center with one of the high school students just being an out and out bigot and using language that is as anti-Semitic as you can get. And they fight, they fight, right? And there is a fight. What's interesting is that the males that are at the high school are all passive as to when this anti-Semitic remarks are being made. The females are much more, you know, hey, you shouldn't be talking that way.  You shouldn't be talking that way. But that's all for the females and the males are reacting very differently. It's a neighborhood that he's moving into that I can relate in some ways because I grew up in suburbia in Southern California. Spielberg comments that as far as you can remember, there weren't any other Jews at the high school. I'm kind of the same way other than my three cousins and my sister, I'm not aware of any other Jews that were in the high school that I went to. And I also remember thinking at various times, gee, it's probably a good thing that I don't have an obviously Jewish name given some of the remarks that I would be hearing at various times. Though I never ran across anybody as anti-Semitic as the character that Spielberg presents in the movie. Now, it's interesting because we see and hear all this rhetoric about anti-Semitism these days. We hear the stats, it's a great concern. But the fact is it existed when you and I were kids. I was there. Yeah, and we grew up with it. I grew up in Queens County in New York and a lot of Jewish people there. Also a lot of Italians and Irish, by the way, and Asians. But there was anti-Semitism you had to deal with it. It wasn't a new thing when I came up with Trump. Anyway, I wanted to go into attention to detail. One of the reasons Steve that I like opera is because a good opera always has attention to detail. And I think one of the reasons that the country and the world like Steven Spielberg's movies think of any one of them is attention to detail. He's a director foremost. And he watches every single little detail. And in this movie, he directs it. And he's heavily invested because it's about him. So he attends to every single detail. And one of the interesting parts is his home, and I guess it was in New Jersey, where he recreated his home from the 50s. Right on down to the books on the shelf, the plates, the table, the silverware, everything in the house, it wasn't available. It's not like he held on to it all those years. It's just that he had people who helped him recreate it accurately from photographs of his home back in the 50s. That's the mark of a great director. You can look around and it transports you back to that time. If you look carefully, you're there. You're there with him. And I think therefore I think he put a lot of energy into this. It was kind of a COVID vacation, if you will, from other filmmaking. I think he took a break from other larger films, although this is a large film, too, and studied his own life and recreated the environment of his own life. What an experience that is. I go back to the fact that it's precious and maybe vain in some ways, but it is a tremendous effort. When you bring his talent to a film, any film, especially this one, you get a tremendous result. The production values here were as good as any film he's ever made. Yeah, he even had, his dad did, he earned some extra money to repair work as to TVs.  And finding those old TVs was probably not easy at this point. So yeah. Steve, do you think that Spielberg's effort here, the making of this film, which is special, will be remembered and he's doing all he can to promote it, by the way. He's not sitting on his stuff over this. He's going out there and talking about it. Another point of dedication to his family. But do you think it changed him to have this, when I call it experience of making a film, this expiation of memories, long lost, long of times, long gone by. What do you think it does to people to have this autobiographical experience and share it effectively with the world? Well, I can actually answer that one by giving the example of when I was thinking about, until you're making some notes in terms of, for this particular presentation. And the fact that at the high school, there weren't other Jewish girls that you could be dating. And I started thinking of them for the first time in decades, I remembered, gee, right at the end there at the high school, the lady I was dating was Jehovah's Witness. We obviously never talked about religion. So we were able to keep the relationship going during that senior year. But yeah, I think it does bring back a whole lot of memories that are very interesting. Well, it did for Proust. I swear to God, I kept thinking of Proust while I'm reviewing this. And the other thing is, why do we care? Why do we care about Spielberg's life and times? Why do we care about Spielberg's childhood? You know, there's so many other things to care about. Why that? I think a lot of people have a lot of different answers, but I'll tell you one answer that comes to me, and which means I will study this film more again. And that is it teaches you about high quality film. It teaches you how to be a storyteller. Fableman, if you will. And how to be a director. So if you have half an interest in making films, and the number of people who have that interest grows by leaps and bounds every day in the sport because of the technology. If you care about being a director and making films, this is a praisey. This is something you can learn from. So as an example, that reality is quite often even stranger than fiction.  They apparently helped her with interacting with the monkey in terms of her own mental illness while everybody else was off to school and husband was working and so forth. But the monkey scenes Spielberg says that's all true. That was not made up. There's also a scene in the movie where there's, takes place in Phoenix where there's a tornado. The mother grabs the three kids. She never got two sisters, has two sisters. She grabs and puts them in the car and she drives towards the tornado while he's got cars going, everybody else is going in the opposite direction. And then when she really gets close to it, she all of a sudden realizes what danger she's put her own family by doing what she did. It's actually a very excellent acting performance by the mother, but also then reminds you of some scenes like in Jurassic Park where the kids are reacting to what's occurring. So it's, yeah, I think it was very therapeutic probably for Spielberg in a lot of ways. But it proves up something that is central to all his movies. And as he said a number of times, all his movies have something of him in them. He takes his personal experience, his personal life, and he puts parts of it in every movie he makes. Steve, we're out of time. Thank you very much for this review. Really appreciate it. I hope people go out and see this movie real quick. What rating do you give it on a scale of one to 10? Oh, it's up there with an eight or 8.5, almost a nine. Okay, not a 10, but it's definitely entertaining. So to mention long, you know, it's two and a half hours. Oh, that is not necessarily a good thing. Anyway, Steve Goodman, attorney and film aficionado, we'll be back with more films with Goodman's garage. That's the name of the show. Aloha. Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.


Now, the G7 summit has started in Cornwall, where Boris Johnson Ergin fell the leadest to build back better as the world recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic. The UK Prime Minister said it was vital to learn from the mistakes of the 2008 financial crisis and tackle the scar of inequality. The leadest posed for the traditional family photograph as they gathered in the seaside resort of the Carpiz Bay. Now, the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines is also high on the summit agenda. US President Joe Biden is among those being hosted by Johnson for the 3-day meeting as well as the leaders of France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Canada.


if you grew up in the 1970s and early 80s your life was probably somewhat like this and when you went to the cinemas most movies were about working class heroes अम मज्दूरों का सीना लोहे की दिवार है और ये हमारे हत्यार है ये हमारा पेट पाल भी सकते हैं अद तुम जैसों का पेट फाल भी सकते हैं and then 1991 happened we have to accept the need for restructuring and reform if we are to avoid an increasing marginalization of India's in the evolving world economy the celebrated Rao Manmohan reforms, liberalization made everyone prosperous now everyone could dream of becoming a Karo Pati and remember that working class hero well he was still working but his style had now become slightly different there can be no doubt that a section of India's population has seen great prosperity in the last 30 years make a first world consumer envious but what happened to the working class hero here is the government's own data between 1991 the year before liberalization and 2019-20 over 29 years the average wages of factory workers have gone up 8.4 times from about Rs 1,750 per month to more than Rs 14,500 right now and if you compare it to the average wages in 1981-82 then the rise is 24 times from just Rs 600 to as I said more than Rs 14,500 but if wages have gone up so has the cost of living so for us to be able to compare apples to apples we have to reduce everything to Rs 81-82 prices to find out what a wage today could have bought in 81-82 now the growth looks less spectacular between 1981-82 and 1991 real wages of factory workers went up at the rate of 2.3% per year this is over and above inflation real wage growth between 1991 and 2018-19 which is the post liberalization year real wages grew at just 0.5% per year but you will ask how can that be true I was just talking about all this prosperity what happened to that all of that went to the rich the owners of assets between 1981-82 to 1990-91 before liberalization profits grew at 3.4% per year adjusted for inflation in the next 28 years the rate of growth increased to 4.3% so real wage growth in factories fell from 2.3% to just 0.5% post liberalization while annual real growth in inflation adjusted profits increased from 3.4% to 4.3% now the change in growth of profit seems like a small number but when you take into account that this has gone on for 28-29-30 years it becomes very large and it makes a huge difference to the share of income between those who work and those who own capital in the 1980s before liberalization the share of wages was 39% and profits was 24% since then the share of wages has dropped to just 19% and that of profits has risen to 58% you will notice that these two numbers don't add up to 100% because every factory actually generates income for various groups of people workers who get wages owners of the factories who get profits but there are others who lease out land, commercial property and those who give loans they get rent and interest now look at the break up those who earn from rent interest and profit are usually going to be the rich those who earn from wages are the poor who are going to be workers in the 1980s the share of profit, interest and rent in total value added was 61% after liberalization it has gone up to 81% which tells you that all the prosperity after liberalization has been garnered by a small group of asset owners not more than 2-3% of India's population probably even less this is all government data and it proves that not only has inequality increased dramatically after liberalization but in real terms it has turned out to be worse for the working classes that's the show today keep watching news click subscribe to us like this video and share it amongst your friends and family


Don't get it twisted. POSIX compliant shell and bash are not the same thing. A lot of people ask me to do more bash scripting tutorials. But the fact is I actually don't really write bash scripts. It very rarely do. When I write scripts, I nearly always make them narrow shell scripts. And bash is technically something a little different. So to be clear, here I am running bash if you can echo 0 and see whatever you're running in your command line. And of course most commands you run if I'm just running echo commands or something like that. They're going to be the same whether you're running in the classical Unix shell or in bash. But there are differences. They are very important. And if you want to write scripts that run fast and are portable, I recommend against using bash for most cases. Now to be clear, if you go to my GitHub, I'll have dozens of scripts. Nearly all of them are POSIX compliant shell scripts. There are a couple bash scripts I have. So I'm going to explain why. I'm going to show you some of the cool things that bash can do that separate it from other scripts. But I importantly want you to be aware that there is a difference. And it is important to know that difference. Okay, so for most things, as I said, most basic commands are going to be the same in POSIX compliant shell and bash. But there are a couple things that are different. Let me give you some examples. So one, I'm going to run the command packman queue. This, of course, is an Arch Linux command. But it lists out all of the programs I have installed on my computer. So I can take this as an example. Let's output that to a file, progs1. In fact, I'll take that file, progs1. And I'm going to copy it to progs2. Now I'm going to open up that second file. And I'm just going to delete a couple lines. Not too many. I'll just delete a couple lines. Now, I do this because you may know you can run this command diff on two different files. I'm going to give it progs1 and progs2. And diff will print out all the lines that are different. So in this case, it's showing us that these red lines with the greater or less than sign, these are all present in the first file but not the second. So this, of course, is exactly the same. Diff is the same in any kind of circumstance. You can run this command in POSIX compliant shell and bash. It's not the commands that are different. It's the syntax that's different. And one nice thing about bash that is not present in POSIX compliant shell is let's say I delete progs1. Now, as we said a second ago, progs1 is really just the output of pacmanq. So one thing we can do is instead of saying progs1 here since we deleted that file, we can actually say pacmanq and put it in parentheses with the less than sign before. Now, this is called process substitution. And process substitution is a bashism. Now, if I run this, you'll see that it looks basically the same as when we had an independent file. And what it's doing in this circumstance is that it's comparing not two files but a file with the output of a command. It's checking to see what's different about them. Or we could compare two different commands as well. So I could say something like pacmanqn which lists all the local packages. So now it's going to list out all the remote or the AUR packages. So we can run that just as well. Either way, this is process substitution and this is a bashism. So why is this important? First off, there are some shells which will deliberately try not to have bashisms. They'll try to be narrowly posix compliant. And MKSH is one of them. So if we run the same command, if we run diff and then pacmanq, compare that with pacmanqn, if we run that it's going to give us an error, syntax error, unexpected parenthesis. Actually, let me make that a little bigger. This is because MKSH doesn't have bashisms. It tries to be narrowly posix compliant. Now why is this important? So the thing to remember is that bash is very nice as an interactive shell. It has all these cool features. You can have a bash RC and all these bash profiles and stuff like that and all this stuff all over the place. Now MKSH can have some of those things but bash also has this additional syntax. And bash runs very slowly. It is one of the slowest shells out there. Again, it's nearly default on every machine but in terms of actually running scripts, it's very slow.  Now depending on, this will be different for different distributions but if you actually go to your BNSH file, you'll find that there is not actually a file called BNSH. It actually is just a link that links to another program. On my machine I have a link to dash. Dash like MKSH is a narrowly posix compliant shell. And the reason I have this is because if I link BNSH to dash, things are going to run much faster. All the scripts that are posix compliant shell scripts, they're going to run much, much faster with dash than they would with bash. But on Arch Linux by default, BNSH links to bash. So whenever Arch Linux finds a shell script that is not marked for bash, but I mean it is going to run bash scripts as bash scripts, but it's also going to run shell scripts as bash scripts because when you find BNSH, it's going to be linked to bash by default on Arch. So that means if you have a system that's running a whole bunch of shell scripts in the background or daemons or something like that, you're going to have a little more, running bash things are going to be a little slower, a little less snappy. Probably not even noticeable, but you know all that kind of stuff can add up. So it's usually a good habit. Dash of course you have to install. I don't think it comes default. I think it is actually default on Ubuntu or Debian or something like that. But on Arch Linux you'd have to install it and then link BNSH to it. It says it on the Arch wiki if you want to know how to do it. So it's usually a good practice. If you want a system that runs as fast as it can go I guess, it's usually a good habit to link your shell to something that's POSIX compliant rather than bash. Now that causes some complications for people who don't know any better I guess. Now let me go to my scripts folder. If I just go around in here, let me just open up some random scripts here. You will actually see that most of them are marked for BNSH. In fact the only two I have, this script here Cable, and there's another one called Shortcuts. I think that's in the Tools directory, but pretty much everything else is in BNSH. I deliberately try not to use bashisms in any circumstance in my scripts. So I'll mark them all as just being shell scripts and this will tell your system to run them as whatever your BNSH is, which again in my case is Dash. So why this can cause problems, a lot of times I will see I guess more novice users, they have just seen people use BNSH all the time and they will write a bash script with a bunch of bashisms in it. They might include something like Diff, Pacman Queue and then File. And if they include that in this file it will break if you have linked your shell to Dash, which again many distributions do by default and many people will do anyway. So be sure you know what is a bashism and what isn't. So I'll give you a couple other examples and then I'll show you a program that does it automatically. Just one thing that actually sort of annoys, so one thing if you want to compare, let's say I want to compare my browser, see what that is, if my browser is equal to Firefox. Then echo, you know, it's Firefox. So you'll see that nothing ran because my browser is not actually Firefox. I think my browser right now is surf. So okay well it's surf, I forgot to rename it. So this is how you compute whether something is equal to another thing in POSIX compliant shell. But a lot of bash users will want to do this thing where there are two brackets and two equal signs which technically is something different in bash that enables like glob matching and stuff. If you want to do glob matching in POSIX shell the easiest way to do it is actually with a case statement.  Okay, now most things that bash adds I think are just minor things like that that can easily be done in, you know, you can just rewrite it in typical shell and it's not a big problem. But there are a couple of things. Let me actually show you one, I've talked about this script before on my channel but it's one of my only other bash scripts and this uses enormous amounts of process substitution and stuff like that. I actually output, I output the output of T to an awk command and that goes to, you know, multiple different places and this is one of those circumstances where the innovations of bash are just such that I really just want to use it. You know, writing this kind of stuff in POSIX compliant shell would be a big pain. But anyway, so I just wanted to, hopefully this sort of clarifies things but to be clear, if you want some takeaways from this I recommend setting your SH to dash or something like that or some other POSIX compliant shell. It will make things run a little bit more snappy, a little less overhead and whenever you write scripts just be mindful whether they're bash or not bash. Actually, I should show you how to tell the difference if you don't know the difference. So there is a program that I have installed called ShellCheck. Okay, and I'll, let me actually go to this directory. So again, this file I have open over here, Shortcuts. So I can run ShellCheck on Shortcuts and nothing's going to pop up because there's no problem. ShellCheck actually checks for a lot of things. It'll check for like bad syntax or errors or non-recommended syntax but let's say I change this to just an SH file and I run ShellCheck on that. It's going to give me all these different errors because it detects, okay, well he wanted a POSIX compliant shell script but he has all of these different bash-isms here. So it will actually print out all the errors and ShellCheck is really nice if you don't have a good sense of what is a bash-ism and what isn't. So I recommend using that. I actually use it a lot and again it does more than just checking to see if it's POSIX compliant. It checks for other errors as well. So sometimes I'll run stuff through ShellCheck. But anyway, so I think that's about it for this video. I'll just, again, I recommend, just know the difference between bash-isms and normal shell and you'll probably be fine. Actually before I forget I'm going to put bash back in there because I'm going to quit the video and then forget about it. Anyway, that's about it and I will see you guys next time.


500 hours, that's how much time I spent on this channel without making a dime when I first started. And I now recently realized that I make $390 a day at least in passive income, and this has been consistent for months. But it wasn't always this way. In order to get this point where I was making passive income, I had to go through years of failure where I wasn't making any money at all. And then when I finally did start making money, years of grinding. The truth about passive income, especially in the beginning, is that everybody wants it. And so you have to work extra hard up front in order to start generating it. And I wish I would have seen a video like this years ago so that I'd have a better understanding about how to go about generating this passive income. Because I think passive income is sort of a buzzword that people throw around and they don't actually realize what it means. I think a lot of people view passive income as money that just grows on trees, but that's not how passive income works. It's more like farming where you're doing a ton of work up front and then you're reaping the rewards of all that hard work a long time down the line. And in this video, I'm gonna show you different ways that I've been consistently generating passive income over the last year. And if you're new to the channel, people subscribe to learn about personal finance, college degrees, careers, and opportunities that are gonna lead you to success. And in order to show appreciation for these videos, viewers also gently tap the like button. We don't do any of that smashing stuff here. And these kinds of videos are never easy to make. It's pretty taboo to talk about the subject of money. And it does tend to get a lot of hate comments, but after getting tons of requests to make a video like this, I decided to. So I really hope this inspires people and maybe it'll give you a few ideas on what you can do in your personal journey. All right, so the way I'm gonna structure this video is I'm gonna start from the most passive to the least passive types of income because not all passive income is created equally. Some of these methods are completely passive and others are semi-passive. So first one on the list is probably my favorite form of passive income and that is investments. Now, this last year has been absolutely bonkers when it comes to the stock market. Millionaires have been made. There's been stocks that have gone up like 10x. There's been cryptocurrencies that have gone up over 1,000%. And I have had an incredible year when it comes to investing. Now, my investments are all over the place. I invest in retirement accounts like the Roth IRA and the 401K. I think one of the safest ways of investing is to put your money into a diversified ETF or index fund. But I also invest into individual companies and usually this is because they pay dividends or it's just a company that I really like. Maybe I'll make a lot of money from that company. Maybe I won't, but either way, I'll feel really good about it because these are companies that I support. A common example of this would of course be the Teslas of the world. And my favorite app for investing in individual companies that's extremely beginner-friendly is going to be Weebol which you can get for free stocks valued up to $1,400 down in the description if you deposit $100. Now, I also invest some of my portfolio into cryptocurrency and that has gone up like crazy as well. Overall, in December 2020, my investment portfolio went up $25,397.42 and that's honestly on the conservative side. Now, I thought that month would never be topped but in January my portfolio went up even more $26,633.58 which is just, I don't even know what to think. Now, you might be wondering, Shane, the video says you make $390 a day in passive income but right there, that alone is over $600 a day. What's going on here? Well, technically speaking, it's not income because I haven't sold any of my investments and on top of that, these two months were absolute freak occurrences. Like, this is not normal at all and in a few months, I wouldn't be surprised at all if my portfolio ended up crashing by $20,000 to $25,000 as well and so I don't think it would be very fair to put all of this as passive income. It would kind of be like cherry picking the really good months. In reality, over the long run from what I have invested in my portfolio right now, I think a conservative estimate would be about $1,083 a month in profit. So that's where we're gonna put as the passive income from my investments. Next, we're gonna be talking about the second most passive type of income and actually I'd say this is tied for first and that's going to be cryptocurrency staking. Now staking is very similar to a high interest savings account but instead of money, it's going to be cryptocurrency instead of getting like 0.1% back of your money every single year, you're gonna be getting around 6 to 8%, sometimes even more return from staking. Now to be honest, I wanna have a little disclaimer here. Crypto in general is pretty risky. So there's three things you really wanna think about if you're considering investing into cryptocurrency. First of all, don't invest any more than you're willing to lose. This is probably one of the more risky types of investing. If you're somebody who doesn't have a very high risk tolerance, I would really suggest just putting your money into an index fund. That's gonna be the best thing for your buck. The second thing you need to know about cryptocurrency is I invest long term. So I'm not somebody who's trying to time the market, buy and sell at different times. I invest long term, so whatever I buy I likely won't sell for five to 10 years at least. And the third thing is you really need to do your research and know what you're getting yourself into. Don't just follow the opinion of somebody on the internet. Make sure you do your due diligence here. Staking is the same way. Now there's a bunch of different websites that do this, but the one I mostly use is BlockFi.com. BlockFi has a lot of legitimate businesses that are backing them and I trust them more than any other staking company. Now some of the other ones you can get a little bit better yield, but generally I'm getting around 6 to 8%. So with those numbers I'm making around $10 a day or so using BlockFi staking, which is really nice. Now I'm very careful and I pretty much only stake like a few different types of cryptocurrency, mostly Ethereum and Bitcoin. And in December I made around $290.70 and in January I made around $308.30. And the cool thing about this is it's compounding interest. So all the money I make from that goes directly back into the account and so the next month after that it's probably going to be slightly higher. So the next type of passive income is going to be affiliate links. So let's say I do a video where I talk about a really good book on money which is The Millionaire Next Door and I'm just talking about some of the parts of this book that I really agree with and how maybe you should read it yourself if you wanna get educated on personal finance for normal people. And I just happened to link that down in the description with an Amazon link. You go to it, you buy the book, I might end up getting like 30 cents. And there's honestly a lot of spammers out there who just like spam affiliate links. And there's also some people who promote products just because the affiliate offer is good. But I personally think overall affiliate links are amazing. And I really just think that it's a win-win situation for everyone. And I personally only promote links to products that I am already using myself. And a lot of the time the person who buys the product is gonna get some kind of discount code. The person who's selling the product, the company themselves are going to get an extra sale that they wouldn't have otherwise. And the person who promoted the product is going to end up getting a small cut as well. So it's a win-win situation for everyone involved. And whenever I'm thinking about buying something I will always go to like YouTuber friends, video descriptions or I'll text a friend for a referral link, something along those lines just because it's literally free money. It's not like the company's upselling the person like charging them extra just because they used an affiliate link. Nope, they're literally just giving them a discount and they're giving you a little cut as well. Seriously, meet Kevin is probably scored like maybe a hundred bucks off of me with the affiliate links I've used in his description. And this is such a great way of making passive income because they basically just sit there wherever you put them for years.  And a few of them end up clicking your link. And nobody has to click on these links. You could just put weebol.com into Google and it'll pop up there as well. And then the person doesn't get the affiliate commission. But if you appreciate the person's video and you wanna help them out then it's nice to click on their link just to give them a little bit of a kickback. Now the first year and a half that I had this YouTube channel I had no idea what I was doing and I actually didn't put an affiliate link of the description until I was over 100,000 subscribers. I finally started putting links in the description just a few months ago. I put weebol link and it's been doing okay. I don't really talk about it or promote it all that much but it's been getting me a few hundred bucks every month. And then I finally decided to put links to other companies that I really like and use in the description. And I have no idea how they're doing because I haven't checked yet. So from what I've heard, your affiliate and sponsorship earnings are supposed to be about like one to one with your YouTube channel AdSense earnings. And because of the fact that I'm not really utilizing that at all it's nowhere near that. It's not even like 10 to one. Like it's not even one-tenth of what I earn with AdSense. So in December I earned around $316.94 and in January it was $405.07 from affiliate links. The numbers are not in yet but I do think that February is gonna be a little bit better. It's probably gonna be over $1,000. Next on the list we're gonna be talking about Patreon. And this is basically a platform outside of YouTube where people can pay for exclusive content. No, not only fans, Patreon. This is something I started because a lot of people were requesting this and basically I keep this extremely minimalistic. So basically people who can't wait for me to come out with a video about whatever subject they want they can go to my Patreon and I sort of just have some lists there that would probably help them out. I have a subjective degree ranking list and objective degree ranking list. And then I also talk about what my investments are as well. I'm thinking about maybe making the Patreon into more of a sort of news sort of thing where if I see really big opportunities come out like a really good investment or maybe some kind of program, some sort of certification where you can maybe like $100,000 with just a six month certification. Something along those lines where it wouldn't be the type of content that would be good enough to make a full video from it but I can make like a really quick video where I talk about it on Patreon. I'm thinking about doing something like that with it but right now I'm just keeping it super minimalistic. Let me know what I should do with the Patreon down in the comments. I'm actually really curious what you guys think. Hey guys, a quick pause here. I'm in the editing process right now and for some reason there were some issues with the last part of the video. So instead of going over that and trying to fix that I've just decided to kind of cut in here and just go over the numbers instead on my spreadsheet right now. And basically when it comes to YouTube AdSense you can check out the video that I made on my YouTube income but when it comes to YouTube AdSense I would say the passive part of YouTube AdSense AKA people finding my videos through search results and then sometimes finding my videos through discovery on the right hand side, the videos that you see on the right hand side when you're on the computer and at the bottom when you're on phone. I say I make about $100 a day or $3,000 a month and I would say that's relatively conservative because there's been several times where I've stopped uploading to the channel and it seems to just promote my older videos more when I stop uploading so it doesn't really seem like it affects my passive income or active income all that much. Although when I upload a lot of new videos it does tend to kind of boost the algorithm a little bit but it honestly doesn't go down all that much. Now, if I stopped uploading for like a several months or something like that who knows what would happen but I would say conservatively speaking I could still make around $100 a day if I stopped uploading. So that's gonna be about $3,000 a month when it comes to YouTube passive income from AdSense. And so when you add everything up in total when it comes to passive income for the month of December it's $4,815.64 and for the month of January it's $4,935.37. So very similar months. For February I do believe that my passive income overall did go down a little bit. My investments didn't do as well. The market did sort of crash around the end of February not everything is in right now but yeah, affiliate income definitely went up for February, AdSense was down just a little bit and then everything else was about normal. So I'd say February might be slightly down from all of these numbers but that's something that you would kind of expect to happen towards the beginning of the year. January, February do tend to be lower earning months but yeah, I just wanted to jump in here instead of refilming the entire video just do this little edit at the very end. If you haven't done it already go ahead and check out my other videos right here I made them just for you and yeah, that whole other intro. Like, subscribe, all that stuff. Thanks guys, have a good one.