Government-owned, contractor-operated

Government-owned, contractor-operated (GOCO) is a procurement and operational model in which a government agency retains ownership of a physical plant and its equipment while a private contractor manages daily operations under a performance-based contract. The contractor supplies the workforce and management; the government supplies the capital assets and assumes long-term infrastructure liability. The model is most prevalent in two areas of the United States federal government: the United States Department of Energy (DOE), whose network of national laboratories is almost entirely GOCO, and the United States Department of Defense (DoD), which relies on GOCO contractors to operate most active Army ammunition plants. Related models include government-owned, government-operated (GOGO), in which federal employees run the facility, and contractor-owned, contractor-operated (COCO), in which the private sector owns and runs the plant with no government ownership stake.

The GOCO model originated during World War II as a mechanism for rapidly expanding munitions production capacity beyond what existing government arsenals could supply. Congress authorized large-scale private construction and operation of ordnance facilities beginning in 1940, and by the war's peak the United States owned 73 GOCO ammunition production plants. The Manhattan Project extended the model to nuclear production, and the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 institutionalized it for the postwar nuclear weapons complex. That legacy structure survives in the DOE laboratory system today.