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. In the piece, titled "Government Contracts Are a Financial Asset," Card points to 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.
"No team, regardless of experience or size, can manually understand millions of contracts on a continuous basis," Card wrote in the op-ed. The implication is that the federal government's approach to contract management is not merely a bookkeeping problem but a systemic financial blind spot. When an agency cannot see the obligations, pricing, and terms buried in its own agreements, it cannot reliably forecast costs, enforce compliance, or pass an audit. The Defense Department's repeated audit failures are the most visible symptom of that gap.
Card argues that AI-assisted contract analysis could give federal agencies the same kind of financial visibility into contractual obligations that Terzo's platform provides 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 stakes extend beyond one agency's audit score. If federal contracts were treated as financial assets, every obligation would carry a real-time value, every renewal or pricing clause would be a measurable liability or opportunity, and every missed term would surface before it became a headline. That shift would change how agencies budget, how they negotiate with suppliers, and how they report to Congress and the public. It would also create a common language between public procurement and private-sector contract management, where similar tools are already used to recover lost money and reduce risk.
Card's argument arrives as AI adoption across government is accelerating, but the focus has largely been on service delivery and back-office automation rather than financial oversight of contracts themselves. His op-ed reframes the problem: the issue is not a lack of data, but a lack of continuous analysis. The full op-ed is available on RealClearPolicy.
For Terzo, the op-ed positions the company as a voice in the emerging debate over public-sector contract intelligence, a market that could dwarf its enterprise business if agencies begin to treat contracts as assets rather than paperwork. The broader implication is that audit readiness may become a technology problem, not just an accounting one, and that the tools used to manage supplier spend in the private sector could become the template for how government understands its own commitments.
