Sarah Kilpela

Sarah Kilpela serves as a key procurement professional within the USDA Forest Service, overseeing acquisitions critical to sustaining the nation’s forest and grassland ecosystems. She manages a specialized portfolio of contracts focused on support activities for forestry, ensuring operational readiness across remote and rugged terrains. Her responsibilities include soliciting, evaluating, and awarding contracts for services that enable ecological restoration, wildfire mitigation, invasive species control, and infrastructure resilience. Kilpela’s work directly supports the agency’s mission to maintain forest health and emergency response capabilities through timely, compliant, and mission-aligned procurement actions. She maintains consistent working relationships with a core group of contractors including ACI FEDERAL INC, ONE STOP RECRUITING LLC, GONDO ROY E MD, THE LOCUMS CO, LLC, and AMD INTERNATIONAL TECHNOLOGIES LLC. These partnerships are primarily centered on specialized forestry support services, including technical consulting, workforce staffing, medical support for field operations, and logistics coordination. Kilpela’s contracting approach reflects a preference for established vendors with proven experience in federal land management environments, fostering long-term, performance-based collaborations that ensure continuity in high-stakes operational contexts. Kilpela’s procurement activity is entirely non-set-aside, with 100% of awards issued under full and open competition. This reflects a strategic emphasis on selecting the most qualified providers regardless of socioeconomic designation, prioritizing technical capability, past performance, and mission alignment over set-aside preferences. While small business participation is not formally incentivized in her portfolio, the nature of the services procured—often requiring niche expertise—naturally attracts small and mid-sized firms with specialized forestry support capabilities. Her primary procurement focus is exclusively under NAICS 115310, Support Activities for Forestry, encompassing services such as prescribed burning coordination, vegetation management, wildlife habitat enhancement, and emergency response logistics. Kilpela’s expertise lies in acquiring highly technical, field-deployable support services that require deep domain knowledge of federal land management protocols and ecological compliance standards.