Uber and Lyft awarded a federal contract by the GSA, estimated to be worth up to $810M over five years, to offer ride-sharing services to public agency workers
thus charging us twice for their shit. we love it don't we folks? https://thehill.com/... Matt Stoller / @matthewstoller : So GSA can't spend the time to fund the Biden transition but has enough bandwidth to hand contracts to Uber and Lyft. Cool cool. https://thehill.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Weeks after their Prop 22 win in California, Uber and Lyft convert a political victory into commercial one: a GSA vehicle worth up to $810M over five years makes the federal government itself a customer of the contractor-based ride model. The companies have lobbied hard for exactly this kind of official acceptance — including spending up to $2.3M in 2017 to push a Texas bill letting them reenter Austin after a city-level rejection.
First-order effects
- Federal agencies can now book Uber and Lyft rides for government workers, giving both companies a large, recurring public-sector revenue stream just as they are paying to rebuild driver supply — Uber with its $250M driver stimulus, Lyft with referral bonuses.
Second-order effects
- The deal hands Uber's CEO fresh leverage in his push for a 'third way' of classifying workers, because a federal buyer has effectively endorsed the contractor model; expect critics like Matt Stoller, who called out the award amid the blocked transition funding, to keep tying procurement to that fight.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, government becomes an institutional customer that locks in gig platforms' status quo — but it also raises the stakes of the classification review that later wiped $20B+ off the pair's combined value in a single week of labor-secretary signals, since any reclassification would ripple straight into publicly procured ride pricing.
The trend: US public agencies are folding gig-platform services into official procurement, turning worker-classification policy into the hinge on which federal ride contracts depend.