With the right teams and resources, this could be done in a shorter time. With that team and skillset there was no way to complete this in a way that did not result in a lot of contract liability to the government and other silliness.

At 20 working days, that’s 4,500 contracts per day. How big of a team do you think it would take to review 4,500 contracts per day?

Quite a big team. However, not necessarily a difficult one to staff.

That said, the whole thing rests on completely artificial urgency; there's no reason that it had to be done in 30 days (and there _are_ sensible heuristic ways that it could be filtered down; for instance small contracts and those about to expire could be filtered out easily; the article mentions a $35k contract, which is definitely "not worth the bother" level).

"We have a completely artificial deadline, therefore we can't do this properly, therefore we should just do a completely nonsense thing" is not a reasonable approach to doing anything.