Who Stops Competing in September?
A USACE task order runs out on Sept. 29 and needed a sole source extension, because the option to extend it was in the RFP but never priced. We pulled three fiscal years of DoD obligations by competition code to find out how much of the year-end surge actually moves that way. On the services side the competed share went up in September, all three years. The whole drop sits somewhere else.
The Pipeline
Every brief →- Sep 145 min read
The Justification Is the Last Thing to Arrive
The Marine Corps posted its reasoning for a $1.9 billion sole-source food services award thirteen days after signing it, one day inside the FAR clock. That, plus SOCOM cutting three years off POTFF III and five other things that moved Monday.
Subscribers - Sep 146 min read
How a Product Line Runs Out of Bidders
Three companies bid on the Army's Live Training Transformation product line in 2009. Five bid in 2014. When the Army ran the same competition again in 2019, after an RFI, a sources-sought and a published draft solicitation spread across 807 days, exactly one company bid. Last Wednesday the notice for the next cycle went up, and it asks whether the work can be set aside for small business.
Subscribers - Sep 134 min read
What Happens When the 8(a) Clock Runs Out?
Peerless Technologies signed its first 8(a) contract in February 2009 and its last in April 2018. On Thursday, eight years after the set-aside coding stopped, it took an $85 million ten-year ceiling out of AFRL against eight offers. The whole transition is sitting in FPDS if you know which field to read.
Free - Sep 135 min read
DISA Named Its Only Source Before Writing the Justification
87.7% of the new award dollars on Friday's Pentagon board went out on a field of one. Over the weekend DISA told the market Motorola is the only source on an Army enterprise radio requirement while the J&A is still in coordination, a New York Air National Guard sole-source notice reposted 29 hours after its own objection deadline closed, and NAVFAC opened the only genuinely contested thing on the wire.
Subscribers - Sep 135 min read
125 Days of Slip Fit Inside a Bridge Nobody Announced
NAVFAC Southwest has moved proposals on the China Lake base operations recompete three times since June, and the incumbent's funded year ran out on August 15. The sole-source vehicle signed thirteen months ago is why none of it needed a new justification.
Subscribers - Sep 126 min read
How a Ceiling Triples Without a Solicitation
Friday's Pentagon board announced a $13.4 billion ceiling increase on Boeing's KC-46 sustainment vehicle, taking it from $5.7 billion to $19.1 billion. The modification was signed on June 2, 2022. Eighteen mods sit on that contract and exactly one of them moved the ceiling, recorded as work within scope.
Subscribers - Sep 124 min read
Cost-Plus Draws a Crowd on the Right Vehicle
424 of the 1,208 DoD contracts running out between March 2027 and September 2028 are cost-reimbursement, carrying $139.9B, and they come back with a single offer 62.6% of the time against 46.1% for fixed-price. Sort the same rows by whether the award sits on a vehicle and the pattern moves, which changes what you should be screening on.
Subscribers - Sep 123 min read
$71 Billion Comes Off Contract With a Partner's Name on It
156 of the 1,208 DoD contracts running out between March 2027 and September 2028 carry foreign funding on their latest recorded action. 85.3% of them are coded not competed, against 40.2% for everything else, and the gap holds in every family on the board.
Free - Sep 117 min read
Who Bids on the Pentagon's Own Audit?
DFAS put the Department of War's agency-wide consolidated financial statements out for quote, a scope the Inspector General has audited in-house for eight years, and got one quote back. It went to Ernst & Young on a labor-hour order with a $989,996,050 ceiling running to March 2032. Across 95 audit orders DFAS has placed, the seven biggest averaged 1.6 quotes.
Subscribers - Sep 114 min read
Three Air Force Bases, One Very New Joint Venture
Eastern Shawnee - Bay West JV has taken two Air Force Optimized Remediation contracts in sixteen days, one of them against eight bidders. Its only contract in the federal award record is a year old, and the bench it ran on belongs to its mentor.
Free - Sep 114 min read
The Do-Over Only Had One Name on It
USCIS reopened the third award slot on a $200M-plus immigration IT recompete for exactly one vendor, the one that had just filed at the Court of Federal Claims. GAO sustained the protest that said the other eligible vendor deserved the same look. Plus two sole-source bridges posted in one afternoon, a five-year enterprise IDIQ nobody gets to bid, and an Air Force tradeoff that paid 28% more for a better rating.
Subscribers - Sep 106 min read
Whose Schedule Is That Order Actually On?
The Space Force moved a Los Angeles AFB IT shop onto the Air Force's $5.7 billion EITaaS Wave 1 BPA, kept performing through the protest, and lost on both scope grounds. GAO says terminate the order and recompete it.
Subscribers - Sep 104 min read
The Quietest Way a Recompete Disappears
Thirty-four contracts dropped off our 6-to-24-month expiration board in five weeks. Thirty-one of them left because somebody rewrote the end date on the award record, and sixteen of those rewrites moved the date toward you.
Subscribers - Sep 103 min read
$226 Billion Shows Up on the Board After the Fact
651 of the 6,482 award paragraphs on the last 500 Pentagon daily boards carry a stamp saying the contract was already signed, $226.2 billion of them. A quarter print more than ten days after the award, and in the DLA section it is more than half.
Free - Sep 95 min read
Two Corrective Actions Later, the Incumbent Is Off the Job
DLH protested the same NIH task order twice and won corrective action both times. Then its order lapsed, the agency signed a sole-source bridge to the company it had been trying to award, and GAO said that was fine. Plus $4.8 billion of CIRCM on a single bid, a $289 million Navy services vehicle awarded without competition, and Fort Gordon's consolidation coming apart four days after SBA blessed it.
Subscribers - Sep 94 min read
Eleven Years of Seats, Then a Contract of Their Own
Aerospace Training Systems Partners has held a seat on the Air Force's training-systems vehicle since 2015, next to Boeing, Lockheed and CAE. On Tuesday the Navy handed the Oklahoma joint venture $10,096,092 to upgrade the P-8A flight trainer's projection system, on a small-business set-aside that drew four offers.
Free - Sep 83 min read
One Bid Is Still a Competition
We read the offer count out of every award paragraph on 500 Pentagon contract boards. Of the 2,438 announcements that say the requirement was solicited, 689 came back with a single offer. The sole-source awards are counted separately, and they are not what is driving the number.
Free - Sep 86 min read
How the Army's Own Cost Estimate Got Into Your Bid Workbook
ACC-APG released the final RFP for the PD BECS engineering support recompete on Tuesday, set aside for small business, which locks the incumbent out of priming it. Four of the eleven tabs in the pricing workbook every offeror has to fill in are the government's own estimate, built off the incumbent's GSA rates.
Subscribers - Sep 85 min read
$15.7 Billion Comes Off Contract on September 30
Seventeen DoD service contracts of $50 million or more hit the end of their period of performance in 22 days. On seven of them, worth $8 billion, the government can keep going for years without competing anything, and the field that tells you which is which is not the one on your pipeline.
Subscribers - Sep 74 min read
Who's Across the Table on a Services Recompete?
155 of the 1,170 DoD contracts coming off period of performance in the next two years are held by a small business. In professional and management support it is 28.3% of them, and on more than half the set-aside that got them there is not on the contract they hold.
Subscribers - Sep 75 min read
The Smaller Contract Won the Consolidation
Fort Gordon's base operations have gone 8(a) five times running, most recently a $126 million award to KGJJ Engineering. On Friday SBA approved the consolidated follow-on as a HUBZone set-aside, which is the program the $8 million enclave contract next door carries. Plus $611 million at OMDAC with no option years left and 54 days to run.
Subscribers - Sep 74 min read
How 95 Bids Ended With One Spectrum Sensor
Research Innovations has booked $166 million of federal prime work since 2012, almost all of it computer systems design and R&D task orders. On Thursday the Army handed it a five-year, $99.5 million contract to build and sustain a three-and-a-half-pound box, out of a field of ninety-five.
Free - Sep 63 min read
Who Books $3.3 Billion Without a Bidders List?
Seven organizations run DoD's eleven FFRDCs, and together they booked $3.34 billion of contract obligations this fiscal year. Three of them rank inside DoD's 100 largest vendors. None of that work ever reached a solicitation, and there is exactly one point in the cycle where it is contestable.
Free - Sep 65 min read
Twenty-Four Years on One Competition
Friday's board handed Northrop Grumman the Missile Defense Agency's IRBM/ICBM targets work through August 2035, one offer solicited and one received. The last time anyone else got to bid was March 2011, and the only public window to object ran sixteen days in February 2024.
Subscribers - Sep 66 min read
The 339 Agreements That Never Come Up for Recompete
Friday's board put $241,340,000 of F/A-18 repair work through a Boeing instrument whose ordering period closed thirteen months ago and whose recorded value is zero. One Navy supply command runs 339 of them, carrying 21,576 orders and $10.77 billion. Sixty-five orders on our own expiration pipeline sit under one.
Subscribers - Sep 54 min read
The Commercial Preference Stops Before Your Recompete
FAR 12.101 tells agencies to buy commercial whenever commercial will do the job. Of the 1,170 DoD contracts coming off period of performance in the next two years, 131 were. We mapped where those 131 sit, and which named services programs are already coded for a part 15 recompete.
Subscribers - Sep 53 min read
The 150-Person Shop That Just Got Its Own DLA Vehicle
Pentaq Manufacturing has sewn $335 million of uniforms since fiscal 2011 without ever booking a single award above $8.6 million. In thirty days it won two DLA Troop Support ordering vehicles, the second one a $763 million ceiling for the services' PT gear.
Free - Sep 55 min read
How a $1.2 Billion Winner Came Up One Simulator Short
Aero Simulation won the Air Force's C-17 training task order, watched three rivals protest it away, and got excluded from the do-over for counting a simulator whose motion legs had been removed. GAO decided that on July 31. The page where you would read it printed it on Thursday, alongside seven other decisions running as much as 86 days behind.
Subscribers - Sep 44 min read
Your Seat on the Vehicle Guarantees You $500
NAVFAC put five roofing contractors on a $200 million MACC on Wednesday and obligated $5,000 apiece. Across DoD, 3,214 guaranteed minimums since 2023 have a median of $500, and 433 of them are zero. The ceiling on the press release is not a number anybody owes you.
Free - Sep 46 min read
The Second Bidder Disappeared and the Ceiling Didn't Move
USTRANSCOM recompeted stevedoring at Charleston, Savannah, Wilmington and Morehead City. In 2020 the work drew two proposals and went LPTA. In 2026 it drew one, at a ceiling $153,657 lower than six years ago, 374 days after proposals closed and 27 days before the incumbent's ordering period ran out. Norfolk, Guam and three Texas ports are next in the same queue.
Subscribers - Sep 45 min read
How Five Amendments Spend a Bridge Year
NAVFAC Mid-Atlantic bought its incumbent a bridge year at MCAS Beaufort on June 2, then posted the recompete 23 days later and has pushed the proposal date four times since. The bridge costs 44% more than the option year it replaced, and a third of it is gone before anyone has bid.
Subscribers - Sep 34 min read
Who Tells You Two Recompetes Just Became One?
DoD posted 39 consolidation notices this fiscal year, up from seven in 2022. Not one of them carries a NAICS code, so a code-based saved search cannot see any of them. One Corps district accounts for thirteen, which leaves twenty-two that matter, and one of those folded 83 Air Force contracts into a single uncompeted order.
Subscribers - Sep 35 min read
The Cyber CSO That Drew Thirty Bidders
Telos Corp. took the $37.8M ACC/A2 IDIQ on August 28. Call 0001 of the IC Commercial Solutions Opening drew thirty offers, a deeper field than most Air Force cyber recompetes get.
Free - Sep 34 min read
Somebody Moved Fort Jackson's Recompete to 2028
The Army gave the market three days to object, then added $180 million to an incumbent's ceiling with one business day left on its ordering period. The reason is a food service prototype being run as an OTA at two other posts. Plus a second $90 million DLA bridge, a $712 million fuze contract with one bidder, and five protest decisions.
Subscribers - Sep 23 min read
Why a Corrected Award Date Only Ever Moves One Way
The Pentagon's daily contract board has printed 176 corrections in two years, and 102 of them are fixing the award date. Not one moved the date earlier. The reporting rule says why.
Free - Sep 25 min read
The Navy Named the Winner 18 Months Early and Still Couldn't Price It
NAVSUP Weapon Systems Support told the market in February 2025 exactly who would get the five-year F414 component PBL, and roughly when. The $2.87 billion award landed Sept. 1 undefinitized, obligated to the dollar at the DFARS ceiling, with the price still open.
Subscribers - Sep 27 min read
Nobody Got to Bid on $1.9 Billion of Mess Halls
The Marine Corps competed its garrison mess halls in 2018 and got four offers per lot. Tuesday's board replaced them with a directly negotiated award to a state labor department, $1.9 billion guaranteed and $4.06 billion if the option runs. The statute that did it turns ninety this year, and it is still moving.
Subscribers - Sep 14 min read
Who Came Back First From the xTech Cohort?
In January the Army signed ten Direct to Phase II contracts out of xTechOverwatch, every one of them inside a $3,153 band. Tern AI's was the smallest of the ten. Last Friday's board carried its follow-on at $11,263,793, one bid solicited and one received.
Free - Sep 111 min read
The Pipeline: September 2026
The forward ledger of major defense contracts approaching recompete: $414B across 1,205 contracts through August 2028, the 131 rows that left the board this month, and the first thirteen entries to move off watch.
Subscribers - Sep 14 min read
September Is the Month Nobody Asks You Anything
For four straight fiscal years, the month DoD posted the fewest sources sought notices was September, and the month it posted the most sole source justifications was the same one. Market research runs a third below the yearly rate while justifications run twice above it. Here is what that does to the 177 contracts on our pipeline that come off contract before April.
Subscribers - Aug 315 min read
Who Told You the Award Date Five Months Early?
No contract announcements posted between Friday evening and this morning, and the pre-solicitation layer moved anyway. A $292.6 million Navy range contract with 97 days left on it, five Army hospitals' food service, DDG-51 maintenance split into two competitions, and a commercial solutions opening for garbage collection.
Subscribers - Aug 316 min read
The Company That Couldn't Bid Just Got Six More Months
The Navy set aside its identification-card support recompete for women-owned small business, awarded it in July, and got protested twelve days later. GAO dismissed both protests inside sixteen days. The document Norfolk posted Monday afternoon shows what that cost: a sole-source bridge to the incumbent running to January 31, 2027.
Subscribers - Aug 314 min read
How a 42-Day Lapse Became a $68 Billion March
DoD put $13.3 billion on contract in October, the smallest month in six years, then cleared $68.6 billion in March once full-year money landed. FY2027 starts October 1 on a continuing resolution neither chamber has enacted.
Free - Aug 306 min read
The Word That Kept CSOs Out of Your Recompetes Is Gone
Section 1823 of the FY2026 NDAA struck "innovative" from 10 USC 3458 in December. On Friday the Defense Health Agency used the result to put five years of end user services out for a whitepaper, under a standing solicitation that never has to name what it replaces.
Subscribers - Aug 304 min read
The Marine Corps Just Hired an Indian Health Service Contractor
Ma'at Enterprises has 49 federal prime awards on its record and every one of them came from the Indian Health Service or Interior. Last Thursday it won a $10.7 million Marine Corps Recruiting Command IDIQ against four other bidders, and the requirement is instructional design.
Free - Aug 304 min read
$35.8 Billion Is Riding on Vehicles That Stopped Taking Orders
Two hundred nineteen of the 709 task orders on our expiring board sit under a parent IDIQ that already closed to new orders, the median one more than a year ago. The follow-on cannot come back on the same vehicle, and one Air Force office has already published where its work goes instead, with dates.
Subscribers - Aug 296 min read
How the Air Force Broke Its Own Unique Source
Three consecutive ALE-47 dispenser production contracts at Robins come back from FPDS coded the same way: not competed, only one source, one offer received. The contract announced Friday is a $147,310,777 competitive award with two offers, and eighteen dated updates on one SAM.gov notice say exactly what changed.
Subscribers - Aug 294 min read
How Much of Your Services Pipeline Is Coded as Manufacturing?
Sixty-one percent of the sustainment dollars coming off contract between February 2027 and August 2028 sit under an aircraft, missile, or shipbuilding NAICS. That one code sets the size standard, the set-aside pool, and whether your saved search ever sees the notice.
Free - Aug 295 min read
$480 Million Moved and Nothing Left the Board
Three contracts on our expiration pipeline took modifications this week and not one of them got a later end date. Plus an AFRL order still absorbing money 544 days after its GSA vehicle's period ended, thirty offers on an Air Combat Command cyber IDIQ, and two SBIR Phase III awards placed in a single afternoon.
Subscribers - Aug 284 min read
Who Answers When the Army Asks for a Spectrum Analyzer?
Thursday's Pentagon board carried 150 stated offers across fifteen competed lines. Ninety-nine of them landed on one requirement, and the company that won it was founded in 2024 and has no prior prime award record in FPDS.
Free - Aug 284 min read
The Fourth-Biggest Buyer in Your Pipeline Buys Nothing
Twelve percent of the DoD contract value coming off period of performance in the next two years is filed under an agency that awards none of it. Filter your board by agency and you drop $49.6 billion, including a $1.6 billion Navy maintenance recompete whose proposals are due September 30.
Subscribers - Aug 286 min read
How a Protest Rewrote What Counts as Experience
DISA reopened its combatant command migration market research on Thursday afternoon with responses due 24 hours later. The reference job it now asks bidders to match is 12,000 users across 20 sites, against a requirement of 231,000 users across 200. That number is the whole acquisition strategy.
Subscribers - Aug 273 min read
Nobody Has a Real Two-Year Pipeline
Pull every DoD contract over $50 million that comes off in the next 24 months and the second year holds 612 awards against the first year's 1,537. The far end of a forward board is thin because most of the paper that will fill it has not been signed yet.
Free - Aug 276 min read
DISA Gave Itself 37 Days
A consolidation notification posted Wednesday folds two Fort Meade facilities contracts into one. The incumbent's order ends November 1, the GSA vehicle it rides stopped taking orders in March, and the earliest the solicitation can issue is September 25.
Subscribers - Aug 274 min read
Dataminr's Second Recompete Went Nothing Like Its First
A $317.8 million follow-on landed on Wednesday's board eight offers deep and 30 days before the incumbent contract expires. Last cycle the same requirement lived on four consecutive bridges for 402 days, and this week DISA opened its EM5 recompete with a year of runway.
Subscribers - Aug 264 min read
Ten Bids, and the Winner Had a $1 Million Record
InfoCAL JV LLC has held a prime contract for eight months and has $1,046,968.58 of obligations to show for it. On Tuesday the Army handed it a Transition Assistance Program IDIQ worth up to $79,665,638 against ten offers. The past performance that made that credible belongs to its mentor, which already runs TAP for the VA.
Free - Aug 264 min read
Most of Tuesday's Board Never Met a Competitor
Six of the thirteen new awards on the August 25 announcements drew one offer or none, and took 88% of the money. Plus DISA quietly archived the CommandNet sources sought instead of soliciting it, GAO sustained a protest over a set-aside decision nobody documented, a NAVSEA sole source survived on certification timing, and the board erased a $27 million award it had announced the day before.
Subscribers - Aug 266 min read
How $245 Million Moves Without a Solicitation
A Navy basic ordering agreement opened at zero dollars in January carries $245 million in orders today. No synopsis, no J&A, nothing to protest, and the authority for it was established at a different service in 2024.
Subscribers - Aug 254 min read
Your Saved Search Still Says 6.302
The FAR overhaul renumbered the seven exceptions to full and open competition, and DoD contracting officers started using the new numbers in March. Ten awards on the daily boards now cite 6.103-x instead of 6.302-x, including a $3.31 billion Navy direct award, and the share is running at 18.5% of this quarter's exception citations.
Free - Aug 256 min read
Whose Fair Opportunity Was It?
Fourteen companies competed for the Army Research Laboratory's IT modernization order in 2025. It has been under a stop-work since twelve days before performance was to start. On Monday the Army posted its plan for the requirement expiring alongside it, and the plan is an $8.75M sole-source modification that runs to December 2030.
Subscribers - Aug 255 min read
What a $131 Billion Ceiling Takes Off Your Pipeline
Monday's board carried a $131.23 billion sole-source ceiling for the F-15 and eleven other awards, and $134 million of that total went to work that drew a second bid. Plus a NAVSEA extension GAO just blessed on a certification the challenger cannot hold until 2027, and three Army and Navy notices that opened the same afternoon.
Subscribers - Aug 243 min read
The Last RS3 Order Gets Placed in 263 Days
Nine RS3 task orders worth $940.8 million come off contract in 2027, and seven of them end before the vehicle underneath stops accepting new orders on May 14. Six carry option runway that outlives RS3. The three that do not hold $396.5 million, and MAPS still has no award.
Subscribers - Aug 244 min read
Seven New Names on a $997 Million Vehicle
NAVFAC EXWC opened market research on its global fuel-systems MACC twenty-two months before the old one stopped taking orders, absorbed a GAO protest in the middle, and still made award with ten days left on the clock. Seven of the ten seats went to firms that had never held one.
Free - Aug 245 min read
How a Contract Grew by a Third Before Anyone Recompeted It
NAVFAC Marianas reopened its Guam custodial requirement on Thursday and amended it Monday, set aside for HUBZone small business for the fourth consecutive cycle. The task order record shows the thing being recompeted is 36% bigger than the thing four bidders priced in 2021, and FAR 19.1303 means being on Guam has nothing to do with who is allowed to bid it.
Subscribers - Aug 237 min read
Your CPARS Record Decides Who Gets the RFQ
GAO just blessed an agency that built its bidders list on past-performance ratings and then refused, twice, to send the solicitation to a schedule holder who asked for it. The rule saying it had to is still sitting in the codified FAR. DoD stopped reading that rule in March.
Subscribers - Aug 234 min read
Why Your Recompetes All End on the Thirty-First
Twelve DoD contracts on our expiring board end on February 28, 2028. Eleven end on February 29. That one-day split is the tell for a pattern that decides when half your pipeline actually comes up.
Free - Aug 235 min read
$499 Million Without a Solicitation
The weekend's procurement record: an Alaska research center's vehicle quadruples on a justification, a Marine Corps advisory pool nearly doubles its ceiling without competing it, and White Sands gave industry four days to answer a sole-source notice on a contract that dies August 31.
Subscribers - Aug 224 min read
What Replaces $3.8 Billion of LOGCAP Next March?
Five LOGCAP V performance task orders worth $3.85 billion come off contract inside a 27-day window in March 2027, and the vehicle meant to replace them is still in market research. The Army posted the LOGCAP VI scoring matrix for industry comment in July, and it consolidates LOGCAP, Army Prepositioned Stocks and EAGLE into one enterprise.
Subscribers - Aug 224 min read
The Wahiawa Nonprofit on Friday's Board
Friday's Navy section carried a $90 million custodial vehicle at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam to a nonprofit that has held the work since 2011 and has never had a competitor. The organization is worth knowing, and so is the Federal Register ledger that says which way this channel is moving.
Free - Aug 226 min read
How an Award Gets Announced Before It's Signed
Friday's Pentagon board retracted a $36.4 million Army robotics IDIQ it had announced 24 hours earlier. DFARS 205.303 requires the announcement to be filed the day before the award is signed, and across the last twenty boards all eleven date corrections moved the real award date later. The record that would settle any of it is ninety days behind.
Subscribers - Aug 213 min read
Two Companies Hold Half the Hardware Coming Off Contract
1,207 DoD contracts worth $421.6B come off period of performance between February 2027 and August 2028. Ranked by who actually holds them, the hardware half is an oligopoly and the services half is a market with 299 names in it.
Free - Aug 215 min read
Nothing on Thursday's Board Comes Back in 2028
Fourteen services awards and modifications landed on Thursday's Pentagon board. Four of them return to the market before 2028, ten are gone until 2029 or later, and a $5.7 billion ordering period that was 40 days from closing just bought itself four more years.
Subscribers - Aug 217 min read
$330 Million Comes Down to One White Paper
The Space Force is consolidating four communications contracts across Peterson, Schriever and Cheyenne Mountain into a single award, and running it as a closed Commercial Solutions Opening. That method eliminates you on a white paper due December 1, and it carries rules most capture shops have never had to price.
Subscribers - Aug 204 min read
Would You Have Seen This Recompete Coming?
The Army moved an eleven-year incumbent off its biometrics support seat with a task order competed on GSA eBuy, three proposals, thirteen days to respond, and no SAM.gov notice at any point. GAO's denial reached the public docket Thursday. The winner's fifteen-year prime record is 90.6% Department of Energy money.
Subscribers - Aug 203 min read
The Wyoming Instructors Inside the Saudi THAAD Fielding
A Laramie SDVOSB has quietly held the Army training vehicle putting THAAD instructors in Jeddah for the Royal Saudi Air Defense Forces. Tuesday's Aug. 19 board added $9.5 million and 15 months to the seat.
Free - Aug 207 min read
An Agency Can't Make You Bid Alone
GAO sustained a protest against the Army's $50 billion MAPS solicitation over four words buried in a question-and-answer file. The remedy is an amendment and a reopening, and the scorecard arithmetic says exactly who that helps.
Subscribers - Aug 193 min read
How Much of Your Pipeline Was Ever a Competition?
We pulled the competition record on all 1,197 DoD contracts above $50M coming off period of performance between February 2027 and August 2028. Competition won 53.4% of the rows and 38.4% of the $444.82B. One sole-source exception carries $209.89B of it by itself.
Free - Aug 195 min read
How a Price Gets Negotiated When Nobody Else Shows Up
NAVFAC Pacific dropped the small business set-aside on its Pacific architectural A-E vehicle and took the ceiling from $50 million to $249 million. The set-aside version drew three SF-330s. The open version drew one, and FAR 36.6 gives a contracting officer nowhere to walk when the negotiation stalls.
Subscribers - Aug 195 min read
$35 Million More on a Contract Solicited in 2019
NAVFAC EXWC bought $35 million of ordering room on an urgency justification because a 2024 EPA rule outran a 2019 solicitation. Also in the sweep: the Navy held FTSS VI's industry day before most of the market knew it was scheduled, DLA Energy is shopping a fuel contract that runs into the 2050s, and the Air Force will only take offers from vendors the FAA has already blessed.
Subscribers - Aug 183 min read
The Archaeologists Who Keep Winning the Recompete
A women-owned firm in Stone Mountain, Georgia has held the Army Corps' nationwide cultural resources vehicle through three straight competitions while the bidder field went from four to thirteen. On Friday's board it took a fourth, at a second district.
Free - Aug 185 min read
How the Army Buys $665 Million by the Hour
Monday's board carried a $664,805,774 time-and-materials IDIQ to Parsons out of Army Contracting Command Redstone, seventeen firms solicited and four bidding. T&M is the type the FAR reaches for last, this one runs 1,789 days, and the ceiling is the only thing standing between the government and an open meter.
Subscribers - Aug 184 min read
Every End Date You Track Is 92 Days Stale
We diffed fifteen sweeps of our own expiration board and caught 33 DoD contracts moving their end date. Not one of them moved it this month. Every change traced back to a modification signed in April or May, surfacing on the day DoD's public-release delay ran out.
Subscribers - Aug 175 min read
When Is a Recompete Not Worth the Paperwork?
Four DoD justifications posted in a single afternoon on Friday, and every one of them adds capacity to a vehicle that was competed years ago. One says the follow-on competition can't physically be run in time. Another says a recompete isn't worth the administrative burden, after 40 firms raised their hands.
Subscribers - Aug 173 min read
Four in Ten Expiring Contracts Are Out of Ceiling
We pulled the funded ceiling on every DoD prime contract coming off the board over the next two years. Of the 1,200 with a ceiling on record, 497 have already obligated every dollar of base and all options. That decides whether the incumbent's runway comes from the contract or from a new action.
Free - Aug 165 min read
Four Volumes Reopened, and Technical Wasn't One
GAO cleared the Army's second corrective action on a $251.7M systems engineering order under RS3 last week. Offerors got to rewrite four proposal volumes, and the technical factor that beat the protester twice stayed shut. The order has now been in competition 732 days. The vehicle it rides stops taking orders in 271.
Subscribers - Aug 164 min read
Five German Builders and a Company From Elkridge
The Army awarded its Germany-wide facilities SRM MATOC on Aug. 14 to six firms sharing a $249 million ceiling. Five of the addresses are German. The sixth belongs to a Maryland contractor that spent its first two decades on 8(a) work inside the Beltway.
Free - Aug 154 min read
Your Account Plan Doesn't Cover the Services Pipeline
We rebuilt the expiring pipeline by issuing office this morning. Three contracting offices hold half of the $301B in product work coming off contract by August 2028. The $99B services half is spread across 186 offices, and 85 of those have exactly one contract on the board.
Free - Aug 154 min read
How Seven Years of Options Hide Inside a 2027 End Date
We put the option runway at 30% of expiring services work nine days ago. On the desk's standard segmentation it is 20.3%, and it concentrates in two families. The named programs whose 2027 dates are decisions rather than deadlines.
Subscribers - Aug 156 min read
Eleven Bids for a Contract That Ends in 2052
The Army just handed its entire initial-entry helicopter training pipeline to one contractor for 26 years, bought through a commercial solutions opening with no certified cost or pricing data. Four contracts collapse into one, the two largest incumbencies expire eight days apart in January, and the next time this work is contestable, most of the people reading this will be retired.
Subscribers - Aug 143 min read
What Do You Do When the Set-Aside Doesn't Come Back?
NIWC Pacific's small business cyber vehicle stopped taking orders in March 2022 and its replacement has still not been announced. Sentar held one of those four seats, spent the gap winning unrestricted work, and on Aug. 12 took a seat on the open successor alongside Booz Allen, Leidos and SAIC.
Free - Aug 144 min read
Six Months and a Call for Solution
Accenture's ETMS2 contract ran out today and got six more months on the way out, while the thing replacing it is a Call for Solution on an Army open solicitation that can land on an OT. Also on the boards: a CIRCM definitization obligated to exactly 75 percent of its ceiling, two identical one-bid IDIQs at one Corps district, and three corrections.
Subscribers - Aug 133 min read
Nothing Over $500 Million Is Set Aside
We pulled the FPDS set-aside determination on all 584 standalone DoD contracts above $50M that expire between February 2027 and August 2028. Set-asides carry 1.73% of the dollars, and above half a billion the share is exactly zero.
Free - Aug 135 min read
How to Get on a Contract That Isn't Being Competed
Military Sealift Command put a fifth ship repair contractor on its Guam multiple-award vehicle on Wednesday's board. The vehicle was competed once, in 2022, and its replacement is already in market research. The seat buys 15 months of ordering period and a place on the incumbent list.
Subscribers - Aug 137 min read
$657 Million No One Had to Announce
Ten DoD contracts in our expiring pipeline were awarded 8(a) sole source, and every one is far above the threshold that is supposed to force a competition among 8(a) firms. The exemption that allows it carries no dollar ceiling at all, and the first of the ten comes off contract in February.
Subscribers - Aug 123 min read
Why the Oldest Contracts Carry Half the Money
The 1,195 DoD contracts coming off period of performance between February 2027 and August 2028 hold $432.34B. The 128 that have been running eight years or more hold half of it, and only 32 of those are services.
Subscribers - Aug 125 min read
Two Sustains and Eight Clocks Still Running
GAO sustained two pre-award protests against the Army's $50 billion MAPS solicitation on Tuesday, the first wins out of 25 filings. Eight more decide between September 23 and November 12. Plus a $992M advisory-services award at Eglin, Fort Gordon going HUBZone, and DoDEA putting two overseas maintenance districts to market.
Subscribers - Aug 124 min read
The Small Business That Didn't Need the Set-Aside
SCMI1 spent six years at Mayport turning one-person support orders into past performance. When the Navy took the small business set-aside off the combat systems recompete, the company won the work anyway, at $20.8 million.
Free - Aug 116 min read
The Requirement Came Back as a Modification
The Air Force bought the Regional Operating Picture twice as a research contract, for $4.6 million all in. On Friday it bought it a third time, for $104.7 million, as modification P00008 to an ICBM sustainment contract that has received exactly one offer since 2018.
Subscribers - Aug 117 min read
The Competition That Ended in the Federal Register
Base operations at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson drew four bidders in 2021. Monday's board awarded the follow-on sole source at twice the annual run rate, and there will never be another competition, because the requirement left the acquisition system through a channel that never touches SAM.
Subscribers - Aug 114 min read
How Cost Realism Rewrites the Number You Bid
We pulled the FPDS contract type on all 1,189 contracts in the expiration pipeline this morning. Cost-reimbursement covers 57% of the expiring services dollars, and on those recompetes the evaluated figure is the government's estimate of your costs rather than the price you proposed.
Free - Aug 104 min read
Who Wins When Price Isn't in the Ranking?
USACE Kansas City ran its civil works A-E recompete under the Brooks Act, reserved four of seven seats for small business, and weighted knowledge of Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska above almost everything else. Sixteen firms submitted, four regional shops took the reserved seats, and two of them had been holding the vehicle it replaced.
Free - Aug 104 min read
The Vehicle Closed 399 Days Ago
We refreshed the expiration pipeline this morning and pulled the parent vehicle behind every expiring task order. Of the 681 orders, 305 ride a contract whose ordering window shuts before the order does, and 201 of those vehicles are already closed. That changes where the follow-on can physically land.
Subscribers - Aug 105 min read
Naples Bought Its Second Bridge With One Day to Spare
NAVFAC EURAFCENT published a justification at 3:57 Monday morning extending a construction vehicle that stops taking orders on Tuesday, and blamed a 2025 hiring freeze. That notice is the common species: four in ten DoD sole-source justifications for services are actions on contracts already running.
Subscribers - Aug 96 min read
Who Gets to Bid on an Option Year?
Military Sealift Command posted a sources sought on Thursday whose solicitation number is not a solicitation number. It is a live contract, and the notice is the FAR 17.207 option determination done in public, with a seven-day window for anyone who wants to price against the incumbent.
Subscribers - Aug 93 min read
Research Is the Least Competitive Thing DoD Buys
We split every offer count in our expiring pipeline by product service code. R&D contracts drew a single bid 43.7% of the time, three times the construction rate, and the concentration sits in the fair-opportunity orders that ride multiple-award research vehicles.
Free - Aug 96 min read
How the Army Competes a Contract Before It Posts One
A special notice went up at 6:31 on Friday evening with white papers due Sunday at midnight, no NAICS code, and a gate that only prior event attendees could clear. The authority is 10 USC 4023, and the competition it satisfies already happened somewhere you cannot watch.
Subscribers - Aug 84 min read
The Consolidation That Stayed a Set-Aside
USACE Omaha folded its fuels construction IDIQs into one vehicle, doubled the ceiling to $699M, and wrote into the consolidation notice that the whole thing stays set aside for small business. Twenty-one firms bid. Seven won seats on August 6, and only one name carried over from the last generation.
Free - Aug 84 min read
The $423 Billion Pipeline Has $29 Billion in It
Seven in ten dollars coming off DoD contract in the next two years sit in product buys. We cut the expiring pipeline by product service code, then followed the services slice down to the largest thing inside it: $1.45B of DCSA fieldwork with 235 days left and no successor solicitation on SAM.
Subscribers - Aug 85 min read
How the Door Closes Before the RFP Drops
Two Navy commands opened services competitions this week and named the eligible bidders before publishing a single evaluation factor. One of them also published its whole calendar out to a February award. Plus the Huntsville MATOC being shaped right now, a $54M ceiling raise at NAVFAC Northwest, and $543M in single-bid awards off the Thursday and Friday boards.
Subscribers - Aug 76 min read
What Gets Read Before Your Technical Volume?
Three of the four rows on the Navy's evaluation table for ProteQ read Not Evaluated. GAO's decision on why reached the public docket this week, and the answer is one corporate policy document the company had, did not need, and did not attach.
Subscribers - Aug 74 min read
Two-Thirds of the Services Pipeline Never Hits SAM
We refreshed the expiration pipeline this morning: 1,222 DoD contracts above $50M come off period of performance between February 2027 and July 2028. Narrow to services and 217 of the 326 are task orders under a vehicle somebody else already won, which means the recompete you are planning against was never going to be posted.
Free - Aug 76 min read
The Shutdown Is Still Writing Sole-Source Justifications
NAVFAC Northwest raised an architect-engineer vehicle's ceiling by $27 million yesterday without competing it, and the justification it published today names the cause: a selection board that the October 2025 funding lapse knocked off schedule. The replacement contract has been in evaluation for 357 days.
Subscribers - Aug 64 min read
The Program Office That Told You What It Wanted 16 Months Early
Kessel Run's Flight Ops office named the legacy programs it wanted to replace in a March 2025 market-research notice, showed industry its draft strategy that August, and took whitepapers in January. The $100M award reached the Pentagon's contract board on July 28, 508 days after that first notice.
Free - Aug 64 min read
Nine of Eleven Awards Don't Come Back Until 2030
Wednesday's Pentagon board was an ordinary one: no headline programs, $534M in new awards. Nine of the eleven carry completion dates in 2030 or later, including a sole-source VMware order that closes the Air Force Network's software lane until the end of the decade.
Subscribers - Aug 64 min read
How a Contract Ends Twice
We filled the base-plus-all-options end date on all 1,216 contracts in our expiration pipeline. On 183 of them the date your tracker shows is not the last date the incumbent can hold the work, and services is where the gap concentrates.
Subscribers - Aug 56 min read
The Only Job That Doesn't Qualify Is This One
The Navy set a $6.5 million floor on qualifying experience for a custodial recompete whose own contract averages $5.5 million a year. Two firms protested the number, one got it lowered, and GAO has now ruled the agency never had to check whether anybody could clear it.
Subscribers - Aug 53 min read
If It Was Full and Open, Where Was Everybody?
We pulled the offer count on all 1,207 contracts in our expiration pipeline. Of the 533 DoD coded as competed, 115 drew exactly one bid, and the single-bid rate is worst on the vehicles built to make bidding cheap.
Free - Aug 55 min read
How a Protest You Withdrew Still Sends the Bill
Abacus Technology dropped its protest of an Air Force network operations award, then filed for costs and waited 319 days. GAO has now told the Air Force to pay for two grounds and not the other two, and the line between them is a due date rather than a ruling.
Subscribers - Aug 46 min read
What Happens When 24 Protests Land on One Solicitation
Eighteen companies have filed twenty-four pre-award protests against the Army's $50B MAPS solicitation. Ten are still open, their statutory clocks run to October 19, and that date, not the Army's September target, is the earliest a clean award can happen.
Subscribers - Aug 44 min read
The Hardest Line on a Capture Plan Is a New Customer
Yorktown Systems Group has booked $538M of federal prime work since 2008 by staffing other people's schoolhouses, and almost none of it was Air Force. On Monday the Academy handed the company a five-year training contract at $51.6M, against eleven other bidders.
Free - Aug 45 min read
The 220 Days DISA Said It Didn't Have
DISA planned to hand the migration of all eleven combatant commands to Leidos without competing it. A protest against the justification killed that, and the sources sought that replaced it closed at 4pm today. Plus the week's docket moves, three sole-source locks running past 2030, and a $50M ceiling that drew one offer.
Subscribers - Aug 34 min read
Where Recompete Signals Actually Live
Most opportunity intelligence is a restated agency forecast. The public record is more honest: end dates, sources-sought notices, protest dockets, and bridge mods, in a sequence you can set a watch by. This is how our pipeline is built.
Free - Aug 33 min read
How Defense Contracts Change Hands
Recompeted is a publication about the moment a defense contract comes up for grabs: the mechanisms that decide who keeps the work, read daily from the public record. Here is what we do and who it's for.
Free - Aug 35 min read
How a 487-Day Bridge Sets the Recompete Clock
DLA put the word bridge into two contract announcements on consecutive days last week, each with a day count attached: 434 and 487. Those numbers are the agency's own estimate of how late its recompetes are, and they back-solve to an RFP date you can plan against.
Subscribers - Aug 23 min read
1,688 Protests, and Half of Them Worked
GAO's protest docket just posted its second-quietest year since 2020, while the share of protesters walking away with relief held at 52%. The chart every capture team should keep taped to the wall.
Free - Aug 19 min read
The Pipeline: August 2026
The forward ledger of major defense contracts approaching recompete: $437B across 1,197 contracts through mid-2028, the quarter the wave breaks, and what the Army's EBS-C walkaway just put back in play.
Subscribers - Jul 313 min read
The Team That Took Over AFRL's Space Experiment Pipeline
Vantage Analytical, a joint venture of two firms that spent decades in NASA's engine room, beat eight other bidders to SSHINE, the $499M single-award vehicle that carries Air Force Research Laboratory space experiments from whiteboard to orbit.
Free - Jul 304 min read
How Guam's Base Contract Became a 21-Year Incumbency
NAVFAC just exercised option six on DZSP 21's base operations vehicle, taking a contract re-awarded in 2020 at $545M to $908M of cumulative value. The mechanism keeping the recompete away is the memory of the last one.
Subscribers
See the recompete before the award notice.
What's coming off contract, which incumbents are at risk, and the mechanics that decide who wins, from the public record.