Office of the Under Secretary of Education

The Department of Education Office of the Under Secretary is a civilian sub-agency within the federal education bureaucracy that administers a limited contract portfolio focused on advisory and professional services. The Office executes contracts to support departmental operations and policy implementation, though its contracting activity is sparse compared to other education-related procurement offices within the Department.

The Office has awarded 111 contracts cumulatively since 2003, generating $14 million in combined potential value and obligating $12.4 million. Recent activity is minimal: the Office closed 5 awards in 2018, 3 in 2019, then dropped to 1 award each in 2020 and 2021, with the most recent award dated June 1, 2024. No awards have been recorded year-to-date in 2026. Across the portfolio history, 67 distinct prime contractors have been awarded, indicating a highly fragmented competitive base with no sustained dominant player.

Over the last five years, competitive concentration is highly fragmented. The Boston Consulting Group Inc. holds the single recorded recent award (1 contract, $1.3 million potential value), representing 100 percent of recent award count but only 9 percent of recent combined potential value — a signal that the Office's remaining recent activity is distributed across multiple one-off vendors with unreported or below-threshold dollar values. The remaining 66 contractors in the lifetime portfolio each account for a small fraction of cumulative awards, and no second-tier vendor is named across the recent-award window.

Set-asides are negligible. Eighty-five percent of all awards carry no set-aside designation (94 awards); small-business set-asides account for 15 percent of the portfolio (16 awards under Total Small Business, 1 award Reserved for Small Business). The mix reflects the Office's reliance on open competitive awards for management and advisory services.

No recent contract opportunities are recorded against the Office of the Under Secretary. The combination of minimal annual award volume, single recent closed award, and absence of open solicitations signals that the Office is not a priority contracting venue for new business development activity as of 2026.