Brandon Card, founder and CEO of Terzo, published an op-ed in RealClearPolicy arguing that federal agencies should manage contracts as financial assets rather than treating them as legal or administrative paperwork. The piece, titled "Government Contracts Are a Financial Asset," highlights the Department of Defense's approximately $445 billion in annual contract obligations across roughly 226,000 active contracts, and its eight consecutive failed audits, as evidence that government agencies lack real-time visibility into what their own contracts commit them to.
The implications of this argument extend beyond bureaucratic reform. If federal agencies adopted the financial asset management approach Card advocates, it could transform how the government tracks spending, identifies waste, and ensures compliance. With trillions of dollars flowing through federal contracts each year, the inability to continuously monitor obligations represents a significant financial risk. Card's op-ed suggests that AI-assisted contract analysis could provide the same kind of financial visibility that Terzo offers to enterprise customers, extending the case for contract intelligence from the private sector into public-sector accountability and audit readiness.
In the private sector, that visibility runs through Document AI, which extracts obligations, pricing, and terms from contracts and purchase orders, and Contract Analytics, which turns that extracted data into spend, compliance, and risk dashboards. Those are the categories of tooling Card's op-ed points to as a model for how agencies could track obligations across large contract portfolios. The failure of the Department of Defense to pass an audit for eight consecutive years underscores the urgency of adopting such tools. Without real-time visibility, agencies cannot accurately assess their financial commitments, leading to inefficiencies and potential waste.
Card's argument also has broader implications for government accountability. By treating contracts as financial assets, agencies would be forced to account for them on balance sheets, potentially exposing unfunded liabilities and improving budget transparency. This shift could lead to better decision-making, as agencies would have a clearer picture of their financial health. Moreover, the use of AI in contract analysis could free up human resources for more strategic tasks, rather than manual review of thousands of pages of legal documents.
The full op-ed is available on RealClearPolicy. The debate over federal contract management comes at a time when government spending is under intense scrutiny, and the need for innovative solutions is paramount. Card's proposal offers a concrete path forward, leveraging existing technology to solve a longstanding problem. If adopted, it could mark a significant step toward more effective and accountable government.
