Introducing Thoughts from Keith
Everyone has a Substack.
Hi, welcome to my Substack. My name is Keith Boyea, and I have worked for the Federal government in some fashion since I entered the Air Force Academy in 1998 at age 17. Since graduating USAFA, I’ve been a contracting officer or in an acquisition related positions for the past 23 years. Most recently, I was the Head of Contracting Activity (HCA) for the Department of Energy’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED). OCED was a passion project for me—it had $25B in appropriations to build clean energy demonstration projects. Unfortunately, it was a victim of DOGE, and I opted for the Deferred Resignation Program in April (as did about 200 of my colleagues in OCED).
As you can imagine, since I’ve been in government my entire life, I’m interested in the civil service. The scope of the civil service is mind blowing—even after 20 years working in it, I often talk to people with civil service jobs I had never heard about. Civil service and government capacity is the first theme of this Substack.
Over the past five years I was in the Senior Executive Service, and the previous six years before that, I was a GS-15. I’m interested in leadership and organizational behavior, and especially ways to make the civil service more effective. That’s the second theme of this Substack.
Lastly, I have been in and around acquisition programs as a contracting officer, agreements officer, grants officer, and HCA my whole career. Those programs are where a lot of rubber hits the government road. As such, Federal Acquisition, Other Transactions, and Federal Financial Assistance are the third themes.
I endeavor to have a feature length article twice a month and shorter, quicker takes more often. I got a lot of positive feedback over the summer of 2025 on some writing I was doing at LinkedIn. This is an effort to expand on those writings by making it a little more formal and rigorously argued. I’ll publish my first longer article early next week and proceed from there. Thank you for reading.