This article is a new update of one originally published February 21, 2025.
Brett Sterenson is experiencing a professional crisis. One month into the new presidential administration, the specialist in site-selection for government conferences was dealing with two cancellations per day, on average — for a total of 18, representing nearly $300,000 in hotel revenue. At the time, he was holding out hope that many of the meetings could be rescheduled and that the melee would subside.
Just two and half weeks later, on March 10, Sterenson’s firm, Hotel Lobbyists, experienced the worst day of business he’d had since March 2020 — and the second-worst day he’s had in business in 18 years.
Rather than subsiding, the pace of cancellations had picked up. By the middle of that week in mid-March, he’d had 46 cancellations for the year, representing nearly $2 million in lost hotel revenue. In just six weeks, his company alone had lost well over $100,000 in business that had been booked.
"There have been only three existential moments in my 18 years of doing this," Sterenson said. "One was when Marriott reduced their commissions [to third-party meeting planners, from 10 to 7 percent, in 2018], and that change then ran across the board for hotels. The second was the pandemic, obviously. And now this is the third."
At issue are the slew of executive orders from the Trump administration, along with sudden and haphazard reductions in the federal workforce and prescribed freezes on budgets and communications — as well as tariffs, rhetoric and border actions that are affecting travel. While the anticipated ripple effects of such actions are causing more event professionals to take notice, the impact has been most immediate for government conferences, as well as meetings that typically draw a significant number of government employees.
Gauging the effects of federal actions
Sterenson is president of Washington, D.C.-based Hotel Lobbyists, which has grown over the past 18 years to book a tremendous volume of conferences for the government sector. Last year he booked 467 meetings in total, the vast majority of them related to government business. By virtue of that volume, his experience offers unique insight into the administration’s impact.
"The most distressing piece here is the pipeline," Sterenson added. "I should have hundreds of thousands of dollars in the pipeline for the rest of the year — and into next. This is pending meetings that have not yet moved to contract, though 80 percent of them do. I have a fraction of that."
Meanwhile, apprehensions are growing rapidly across a wider swath of event professionals who rely on government business for a smaller percentage of their income. "I've got clients that are federally funded by the [National Institutes of Health]," explained Seattle-based Alix Mendonca, director of regional sales for Prestige | Global Meeting Source. "I have clients that have programs that are related to diversity, equity and inclusion, that are attending other DEI conferences with concerns that funding could be cut off and those events won’t happen. And if so, am I going to be penalized for getting a block of rooms to a conference that doesn’t happen?"
Mendonca’s clients haven’t yet had to cancel an event. "But I go to a lot of travel conferences, and I talk to a lot of colleagues — end users, planners, third parties, hoteliers — and there’s a lot of apprehension out there, and not a lot of concrete facts yet," he says. "We really need to hear what’s happening in D.C. and what to expect."
D.C.-based Sterenson’s lost revenue is all the more noteworthy because not a lot of event professionals are speaking out about specifics yet — in some cases due simply to the uncertainty around whether their meetings will happen.
According to the latest Northstar Meetings Group/Cvent Meetings Industry PULSE Survey, more than 60 percent of planners said the administration’s policies are affecting their meetings, and more than half are less optimistic for their meetings than they were two months ago. This is the first time since the pandemic that pessimists have outnumbered optimists in the survey.
In late February — at the same time Sterenson was experiencing two cancellations per day — the Society of Government Meeting Professionals said their members were not feeling these effects. "The recent federal workforce downsizing has had minimal impact on government meetings, with SGMP suppliers reporting less than 1 percent cancellation rates," a spokesperson for the independent nonprofit organization noted in a statement. (Sterenson, a 24-year member who has served on the local and national boards, was not queried by SGMP about his cancellations.)
When contacted again in mid-March, the SGMP declined to comment, noting simply that they are a nonprofit organization serving the professional development needs of government meeting planners and have no lobbying arm.
Avoiding "political" discussions
The SGMP’s response suggests that commenting on planner concerns and the impact of federal actions would constitute political discourse. Conventional wisdom for many event organizers has been to avoid politics — after all, event organizers typically serve a wide variety of constituents and no one wants to alienate half of their audience. This seemed to be a factor among some professionals who did not wish to be quoted in this story.
On the other hand, if any policies from any political party are having a direct impact on the meetings business, shouldn’t event professionals be prepared to react?
"It’s all politics," noted Joan Eisenstodt of Eisenstodt Associates, a Washington, D.C.-based meetings consultancy. Eisenstodt has been raising alarm flags about the potential impacts of the administration’s policies for quite some time — but that isn’t because she’s a doomsayer, she explained. "I’m a realist, because I do contracts, and I do risk-management plans, and I have to think, 'What are the worst things that can happen and what would disrupt our business and our events?'" she said. "It’s irresponsible to plan a meeting without considering all of the factors that could impact anybody. Didn’t we learn anything from Covid?"
What's being canceled?
Sterenson’s 46 cancellations provide striking visibility into the types of programs that have already been impacted. Generally most of the cancellations are due to machinations of the Department of Government Efficiency, the initiative led by Elon Musk that has demanded that government agencies make cuts, particularly to travel. Here's how the cancellations break down, by category:
- International interests/cultural exchange
A whopping 20 of Sterenson’s canceled meetings were in some way related to the Department of State (booked via contractors). All were focused on bringing leaders together, generally across nations and cultures, as a way to strengthen relationships and share best practices. Two of these meetings were geared to U.S.-based civil society leaders, and were canceled as a result of the executive order related to DEI programs. - Health and Human Services
Several programs involving health-related research and diagnostics were canceled because the department was forced to refrain from any public-facing initiatives. - Internal Revenue Service
Two cancellations occurred among committees and areas within the IRS — and were axed well in advance of tax day today. - Science and Technology
Two research meetings were canceled, likely for cost-saving measures. - Defense
Several cancellations were related to research and workgroups at the Department of Defense. - Environmental concerns
Two meetings for which attendees were to include employees of the Environmental Protection Agency were axed. - Crime and justice
A few Justice Department meetings were canceled, or scaled so far down they no longer required the original block. - Agriculture
Multiple programs related to food safety were canceled.
Other cancellations among Sterenson’s list are related to the departments of Education, Labor, the Federal Transit Administration and a nongovernment office concerned with community justice.
Multiple hoteliers in the Pacific Northwest said they have lost business from Canada, some due either to cancellations or Canadian clients who changed their plans before contracting.
(If you are a planner in Canada, please take our quick PULSE Survey for Canadian planners and make your voice heard.)
DEI-related cancellations and content shifts
Upon taking office, President Trump issued an executive order terminating DEI initiatives in the federal workforce around employment and training. The order strongly discouraged DEI initiatives in the private sector, as well. Federally funded agencies have since scrambled to determine how best to conform to the edict.
The confusion around what specifically can be categorized as DEI and whether federal employees can attend events that could be perceived as such is leading to cancellations — as well as budget shortfalls as sponsors rethink their investments in larger public events. In mid-March, for instance, four major sponsors pulled out of this summer’s SF Pride event in San Francisco, representing the loss of $1.3 million in funding. Industry observers were likewise waiting to see whether the World Pride event scheduled for May in Washington, D.C., would proceed on the scale initially planned. Just this week, the organization raised its safety alert for the event and downgraded expectations for turnout.
In terms of Sterenson’s government-conference cancellations, several could be directly attributed to the DEI edict, while many more of the cultural-exchange cancellations could be related.
But beyond scrapping events, the policies have had a direct effect on content — or, at the very least, the description of said content. One source admitted to going through an entire conference agenda to remove a circulating list of keywords they were concerned could attract unwanted government attention — a practice, the source said, that was becoming increasingly common. While the nature of the sessions wasn’t changing, the way they were being described was.
How will government-meetings contracts be affected?
Many of Sterenson’s cancellations to date have involved hotel contracts unique to government groups, in which hotels waived cancellation and attrition fees.
For the contracts in which cancellation and attrition fees are present, most of his clients are claiming force majeure — and thus far only one hotel has objected and forced the client to pay a cancellation fee.
In some instances, the client has proactively said they would cancel and pay the fee. The biggest one Sterenson has seen so far was $400,000. That’s taxpayer money going to fund a hefty cancellation fee for a meeting that was cut in the name of cost savings, without the meeting’s objective having been addressed.
Planners can try to protect themselves and their clients by incorporating force majeure and frustration-of-purpose clauses. The question is whether hoteliers will be as flexible if cancellations increase. Sterenson is also concerned about the future of these contracts, as hotels might be less inclined to waive such fees for government groups.
"Over the years I've built a strong reputation with hotels that are very willing to engage with risky contracts — no cancellation and no attrition — and they take that risk because there’s always been a lot of reward. The volume has been incredible," Sterenson explained.
But with hotels potentially getting burned this year and the volume of meetings likely to go down, such deals won’t be as attractive to hotels. "I think it’s going to be harder and harder for government meetings to find homes," Sterenson said, "because they're losing the trust, they’re losing their willing partners across the board. That’s my fear."
