When President Barack Obama promised to drastically cut federal contracts, he cited the statistic that total spending by the federal government on contracts grew by 12 percent a year between 2000 and 2008. Obama said he would reverse that trend and save taxpayers $40 billion a year.

Four years later, we've found that Obama hasn"t hit that dollar figure, but he has trimmed contract spending significantly and gutted its growth.

In 2010, federal contract spending was $535 billion versus $550 billion in 2009, according to data provided by the White House.

In 2011, contract spending held steady at $535 billion. "This marks the first time in almost two decades that spending has either declined or remained unchanged for two years in a row. In fact, had contract spending continued to grow at the same pace as it did in the last administration, we would have spent $690 billion on contracts, or $155 billion more than agencies ended up spending in FY 2011," Danny Werfel, controller for the White House Office of Management and Budget, wrote on the White House blog.

Werfel wrote that the reductions were accomplished by ending contracts that were "unnecessary, unaffordable or redundant" and by "leveraging the government's buying power through increased use of government-wide and agency-wide contracts."

In 2012, contract spending fell by another $20 billion from the 2011 level.

A December 2012 blog post by the OMB's Joe Jordan noted an example at the Department of Homeland Security, which saved more than $386 million last year by pooling purchases for products from canines to surveillance equipment across FEMA, the Coast Guard and border patrol.

"Things are going in a good direction, but they're still not in a good place yet," Craig Jennings, of the government-accountability group OMB Watch, told the Washington Post.

So the Obama administration has fallen short of it"s $40 billion-a-year goal, but contract spending is on a downward track. We rate this a Compromise.