As the nation reels from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Department of Defense (DoD) is playing a vital role in supporting civilian authorities at the federal and state levels. DoD’s contributions depend on the availability of personal protective equipment (PPE) to safeguard DoD personnel as well as to address dire shortages, such as for N95 masks, plaguing civilian healthcare workers on the frontlines.
Given the critical importance of PPE to response efforts, Govini analyzed trends in DoD PPE spending since FY13. Govini employed supervised machine learning techniques to parse text-rich contract description data using keywords and National Stock Numbers (NSNs) to identify and taxonomize DoD’s PPE spending.