This paper garners information crucial to understanding business growth for new entrants and small businesses who contract with the federal government by utilizing publicly available contracting data from the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS) to track new entrants from 2001-2016. This information is then used to evaluate entrances, exits, and status changes among federal vendors with the purpose of comparing challenges faced by small businesses with those of larger ones. Measuring market trends over time and in multiple sectors shows how the challenges facing small businesses, such as market barriers to entry and imperfect competition, keep them from growing. The final results compare the survival rates between small and non-small new entrants contracting with the federal government and analyze the graduation rates for those small new entrants who grew in size during the observation period and survived after ten years. The study finds that around 40 percent of new entrants exit the market for federal contracts after three years, around 50-60 percent after five years, and only about one-fifth of new entrants remain in the federal contracting arena in the final year of observation. Across the six samples studied, thegraduation rates of small businesses consistently decrease.

In light of Section 881 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017, which expanded the legal definition of the National Technology and Industrial Base (NTIB) to include the United Kingdom and Australia, this report informs NTIB partners on barriers and opportunities for effective integration. The expansion of the NTIB is based on the principle that defense trade between the United States and its closest allies enables a host of benefits, including increased access to innovation, economies of scale, and interoperability. In order to reap the greatest benefits of a new era of NTIB, this report uses the lessons learned from study of the present state of integration to identify areas of opportunity for policy reforms and greater cooperation.

International joint development programs are important because of their potential to reduce costs and increase partnership benefits such as interoperability, economies of scale, and technical advancement. While all major development and acquisition programs are complex undertakings, international joint development programs introduce additional layers of complexity in the requirement for coordination with more than one government customer, supply chain and organizational complexities resulting from international industrial teaming, and technology control issues. The performance of international joint development programs varies greatly. This study compares the best practices of international joint development and domestic development programs through case-study analysis to identify the key variables that contribute to a program’s eventual success or failure and to understand the elements that are crucial to managing these programs.

This report analyzes the current state of affairs in defense acquisition by combining detailed policy and data analysis to provide a comprehensive overview of the current and future outlook for defense acquisition. This analysis will provide critical insights into what DoD is buying, how DoD is buying it, from whom is DoD buying, and what are the defense components buying using data from the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS). This analysis provides critical insights into understanding the current trends in the defense industrial base and the implications of those trends on acquisition policy.

This report is the second in an annual series examining trends in what the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is buying, how DoD is buying it, and from whom DoD is buying. This year’s study looks in depth at issues in research and development, acquisition reform in the FY2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), performance of the defense acquisition system, the future of cooperative International Joint Development Programs, and major trends apparent in the activities of the major defense components. By combining detailed policy and data analysis, the study provides a comprehensive overview of the current and future outlook for defense acquisition.

All 19,917 FEMA personnel were invited to participate, and 8,946 completed the survey (44.9-percent response rate). Responses were weighted to represent the FEMA population. The survey results (highlights of which are contained in this brief) reveal areas in need of improvement and will help guide FEMA leadership decisions about programming and policy responses.

Following the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA's) 2018 internal investigation into sexual harassment and misconduct in its senior leadership ranks, FEMA leaders chose to openly discuss the problems and the need to develop and maintain a workplace in which all employees are treated with professionalism and respect. Although FEMA's investigation provided insights into the culture and misconduct in one FEMA office, it was not designed to provide a comprehensive account of harassment and discrimination across the organization. Thus, FEMA asked the Homeland Security Operational Analysis Center (HSOAC) to provide an independent and objective assessment of the prevalence and characteristics of harassment and discrimination at FEMA. In April and May 2019, HSOAC fielded a survey designed to estimate the annual prevalence of workplace harassment and discrimination at FEMA and assess employee perceptions of leadership and workplace climate. In addition to sexual harassment, the survey assessed gender discrimination and racial/ethnic harassment and discrimination to provide a more complete description of the types of civil rights violations (harassment or discrimination on the basis of membership in any protected class) experienced by FEMA employees. This report contains detailed documentation of the results of that HSOAC-fielded survey.

To develop metrics that can inform decisionmaking for awarding predisaster mitigation grants, the authors established three lines of effort (LoEs) for analysis. Each LoE produced a metric or framework that could support grant decisionmaking.

The history of childbirth in America appears to be characterized by a radical break; suddenly, doctors appeared at births and midwives vanished. This dissertation argues that the discursive climate required to enable such rapid change preexisted the forceps, and the physician, at American births and that it dates back to the Puritan period. Puritanism contained within it a system of gender paradigms that at once made possible woman's submission and emancipation. A variety of texts, from journals to novels, from histories of childbirth to works of literary criticism, are considered in order to present not just a story of male cooptation of birth, but instead one that accounts for women's role as agents of change and dissent. Chapter one looks to the seventeenth-century American Puritans at the Antinomian Controversy of the 1630s as well as the poetry of Anne Bradstreet. Chapter two considers the life of Jonathan Edwards, as well as that of his daughter, Esther Edwards Burr. Burr, especially, is revealing as a mid-eighteenth century mother who straddles the Puritan and pre-revolutionary periods. The final segment of chapter two addresses Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette (1798). Chapter three considers the nineteenth century boom in mothering manuals as well as Lydia Maria Child's novel Hobomok (1824), which revisits the Puritan period to consider the pressing question of "woman's sphere." Chapter four takes on the work of the Beecher sisters, particularly Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, The Minister's Wooing (1859), as well as some of the activist writings produced by her and her sisters, in order to consider a dominant narrative about woman and her place, as well as the ways in which women were pushing back against this narrative. All four chapters account for the history of American childbirth, and links these events to a larger story about women's relegation to a "sphere" and their fight to expand and even escape it. The conclusion goes on to consider what happened in the birthing room over the course of the twentieth century in order to trace the emergence of the "assembly line" that characterizes most births today.