Why Booz Allen CEO Horacio Rozanski Welcomes DOGE Scrutiny

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You might assume it’s not a good time to be the CEO of Booz Allen Hamilton, which makes about 98% of its revenue from government-related work. As part of the Trump Administration’s efficiency purge, the General Services Administration is calling for agencies to cancel contracts with the top 10 highest-paid consulting firms contracting with the federal government, including Booz Allen.

But Horacio Rozanski is trying to turn the environment of government cost-cutting into an advantage for the company where he’s worked his whole career. He thinks Booz Allen can teach the government a thing or two about how to trim budgets efficiently and how to operate with fewer people. Rozanski, 57, says his company has done all of this before—many times for the U.S. government—and that the company will happily help the government as it looks for efficiencies. 

TIME spoke to Rozanski on April 1 about some of his ideas to fix government inefficiency.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

What attracted you to Booz Allen initially? 

I was born and raised in Argentina, and came here to go to school. When I was in grad school, I joined Booz Allen. I loved the idea of working with lots of different companies and helping them problem-solve tough issues. 

Eventually, as I got more involved with what Booz Allen is now—more on the side of the work we do in national security— the opportunity as an immigrant to have an impact on missions of national importance was just too hard to pass up. And one day, my wife said to me, you realize you're going to retire from Booz Allen someday and I said, I guess I never thought about it that way.

The General Services Administration has proposed cutting contracts with consulting firms like Booz Allen. Can you explain some of the work you do for the government currently? 

Booz Allen centers on national security work. We used to have a commercial business and a government business, but post-9/11, our government business became more centered on these national security missions. Like busting the silos of information across the intelligence community that had been a core issue for how 9/11 happened. 

If you look at Booz Allen today, about three quarters of our work is national security work. It's Department of Defense., it's intelligence, it's work on border security and law enforcement, counter-terrorism, cybersecurity. We built the most successful data platform the Department of Defense has ever had. It's called Advana. 

In addition to that, we do a lot of work for the health agencies, especially the VA. There's still much work to be done there, but we've come a long way as a country in terms of veteran benefits as a result of the efforts of the VA and the work that we've done for them. 

Can you give an example of some of the national security work you do? 

We started doing work on IEDs [improvised explosive devices] and defeating IEDs and trying to get that done really fast. It was understanding the tactics of the adversaries on the field, what they were using, and then how to build a technology that would jam a device or diffuse a device.

I walked into a team room one time—we had bomb makers and people that take bombs apart but then also build duplicates. It was inspiring and that work really grew and became so core to Booz Allen.

Why does the government need Booz Allen to do this type of work?

First of all, because we bring a private sector perspective and private sector innovation and private sector speed and flexibility that the government doesn't have. They cannot attract the same type of talent. They cannot invest in technology the way we do. We partner with commercial technology companies to bring that into the government. We work with relatively new Series A startups all the way to the hyperscalers. 

So you know, it's for the same reason that the government doesn't build ships and the government doesn't build planes, because private sector innovation is necessary to a well-functioning government.

How would you defend the work you do to a government interested in cutting contracts?

You know, I don't believe in defending the work that we do. I believe that the government should be constantly reviewing how it spends its money, and certainly we as a company do that. That work should either stand on its merits because it brings technological innovation and real value, or it doesn't, and then the work should go away. 

As you know, from one administration to another, priorities change, and something that was important before is less important now. I don't think we're in the business of defending our work. I think we're in the business of creating value and then hopefully letting the value drive the decisions our clients make.

And that value is doing things more efficiently and better than the government can do on its own? 

I think the value is about creating an outcome. You know, what is the government trying to do? What is the most efficient and most effective way to do it? That's the maxim here. I will say, this is the first time in our collective memory that we've been asked to participate in a review of our work. And I think that's a good thing. It's a good thing that it's happening and I'm glad they asked us for our opinion.

You’ve said you could help the government operate with fewer people. How would that work?

We do that on a regular basis. You know, a lot of our work is around modernizing and bringing technology to the government that ultimately frees up resources. It's up to the government to decide what to do with those resources. 

Take claims processing. Claims processing is a massive activity done across lots of places in the government. We're bringing artificial intelligence to that. Sometimes these medical claims could be 900 pages because it's your entire medical record going back 60 years. And you have to prove, in that claim, that your problems come from your time in military service and not something that happened before. 

We developed an AI tool for the VA that can cut down that process significantly by going through the entire claim and essentially pulling out the relevant parts for an adjuster to then adjudicate. So it's still a human process to adjudicate, but you don't have to read 900 pages, you can extract the pieces that really matter. That saves a ton of time. 

I'm proud of the fact that we built a system and a set of tools that make the process massively more efficient. And I'm glad that now we're talking about efficiency as a priority.

How are you communicating your worth to this administration? 

As people get confirmed, we're sending in our ideas, sometimes backed up with a technical document that says, “This is how you would build a system.”

What's interesting is, many of those ideas are not new. They’re ideas we’ve shared with prior administrations and efficiency wasn't a priority. So now that efficiency is a priority, we hope those will get taken out.

Using what you’ve learned at Booz Allen, how can the government reduce costs? 

One area where I think big savings are—and DOGE is finding this—is duplication. Everything gets done multiple times. A lot of it has to do with how these departments are structured and funded. It's not that the people in the departments want to duplicate, it’s that their funding lines are built that way. 

In a company, if we have something that works in one division, we say, “Oh, that's awesome. Now everybody has to use it.” In the government, there's no such process, so everybody builds their own.

What’s an example of this redundancy?

Every time the government pays a health claim to a physician, they need to verify that that physician is licensed—verify the address and so forth. There are at least seven databases across the government that do that—Is this person really an internal medicine doctor? Are they really licensed in the state of Maryland? 

Seven different databases, they're not synchronized with each other, so they probably don't have the same information. As we add up all of that, there's tens of billions of dollars a year that could be saved.

The same is true in the classified domain. If you get a security clearance from one three-letter agency, it is not valid at another three-letter agency. The country's not safer by having somebody have to go through the whole arduous process again.

When you try to find efficiencies, people sometimes lose their jobs. Is there a way to make this process less painful? 

You know, that's a question, honestly, for the government. The government can decide. I think that the work that DOGE is doing around identifying these issues quickly is really important. I think the fact that each agency is focused on this, and they're focusing on it now, and they're not letting the question linger, is really important. 

If you want to operate with fewer people, you will need more and better technology. We believe this change, at the end of the day, puts a company like us in a good position, because we deliver that technology. We deliver advanced technology every day in these agencies.

What kind of opportunity do you see here for Booz Allen as the government focuses on cost cutting?

I think the biggest opportunity here is if the government is going to implement modern, up-to-date technology. Booz Allen is a natural key partner in that. Our stuff works and we can demonstrate the value of our work. 

If some of this regulatory pressure gets eased a little bit, we can be even more efficient in the way we deliver many of these things. Because we have all these partnerships with technology companies, we're in an excellent position to help this agenda of efficiency across the government.

What regulatory pressure are you referring to? 

Working with the government can at the same time be the most inspiring and amazing work, and it can also be the most frustrating. The level of regulatory burden that companies like ours carry to do this work is extraordinary. Some of that regulation is absolutely necessary given the nature of the work, but a lot of that regulation is just things piled up on top of things on top of other things that no longer make sense.

For example, the government still does a lot of things on a cost-plus basis [paying a contractor for expenses plus an additional profit].  We've been arguing away from that and towards a fixed-price outcome base. You don't pay if you don't get an outcome. 

The amount of money the government could save by a move like that would be amazing, because it would free up the private sector to figure out the best way to deliver the service, as opposed to being micromanaged in the delivery. 

If you look at the Department of Defense, oftentimes to onboard software on a government platform requires freezing the code for six months so that they can review the code. I don't know a single commercial company competing in the private sector that can afford to freeze its code for six months and not be out of business at the end of that.

Is there anything else you want to add?

The one thing that I will say—our industry has been characterized as resisting this change. I won't speak for the industry, because my industry does frustrate me, but I'll speak for us. We welcome the opportunity. I welcome the review. I welcome the opportunity to work with DOGE on these things. 

We've been pitching ideas for efficiency for a long time, and I love the fact that those are going to get looked at now, because the political will is there. And by the way, these are not ideas that necessarily benefit Booz Allen. These are good ideas we believe have value.