By: George Albamonte
It is mid-February and not too early to get a sense of Federal Contracting in the new year. At this point in the year, there are 567,693 contracts representing $71 Billion dollars. By the end of the year, the data on contracts will be too voluminous for most people to analyze using conventional tools; the 2016 data download is an 11 Gigabyte csv file. That’s big. Too big for Excel. The 2017 Federal Budget is divided into Contracts, Grants, Loans, Insurance, Other Direct Payments, and Other. This post will focus solely on the contracts.
Contracts by Type
The Contracts budget, so far, includes more than a half million contract vehicles, of which 56% are Delivery Orders, 25% are Purchase Orders and 5% are regular “Definitive” Contracts. The dollar volume ($35B or 49%) is mostly with the definitive contracts. Another $28B (39%) is with the Delivery Orders. Here we see what we will see often: Most of the dollars are in a few contracts. A mere 50 contractors account for more than 44% of the dollar contract value. That’s $31B worth of contracts shared among 50 contractors.
Contracts by Vendor
So far this year, there are 64,214 vendors. More than 21,000 vendors have contracts for less than $1M, or another 38,772 vendors have contracts between $1M and $1.25M. The chart shows the distribution for contractors having more than $1.25M.
There are 3,539 contractors in the range between $1.25M and $10.25M; about half of those have contracts between $1.25M and $2.25M. In summary, there many vendors (give or take 60,000) with small contracts; a few vendors (about 50) with large contracts and most of the dollars. And then, there’s the middle.
Contracts by Funding Agency
Below is a table breaking down contracts by funding agency. Defense is largest, but we know that. Who knew that Energy was next largest, or that NASA was ahead of State? Note that these numbers have nothing to do with personnel. This is goods and services we buy or rent from contractors.
Spending by Product or Service Type
As a country, this is what we buy from contractors. This subset accounts for more than 50% of the total. I included items for which we spent more than a half-billion dollars:
Contracts by State
You might wonder if Federal Spending is correlated with State GDP. Maine and Arkansas are among the states with the lowest GDP, so look for them in this table.
(Note: If there is a relationship, it is not necessarily causal; It may not be that government spending increases the GDPs of states; the government might spend more in states with low GDPs, because they have low GDPs, i.e., the causality is opposite.)
Top 3 Contracts by State
This accounts for $24B of the $71B in total spending thus far. Click HERE to view a table showing the largest three contracts in each State and Federal Protectorate. The table indicates the Industry of the contractor, and the work being done, as well as the state and the office requesting the contract. There are only 168 rows, but this gives a feel for the details of how we as citizens spend our tax dollars.
Frequently occurring items include “Operation of Government R&D GOCO facilities”. GOCO is Government Owned, Contractor Operated. Guard and Housekeeping services occur several times, along with Other environmental services, Operation of Miscellaneous Buildings, and Operation of other Educational Building.
Continue following the JAMIS Prime Insights blog for more information and analysis as the year moves along under a new administration. And to learn more about how JAMIS Prime ERP is helping government contractors manage their contracts, financials, and personnel, visit us at www.jamis.com.
