Eight Business Days, Thirteen Other Transactions
Congress gave the services a construction authority that is explicitly not a contract in last December's NDAA. DoD construction notices invoking an Other Transaction ran at zero in nineteen of the last twenty-five months. Thirteen have posted since October 1, four of them on Tuesday afternoon, and the statute lets whoever wins the first one take the follow-on work without further competition.
If you run a federal construction capture desk, four notices hit your saved searches on Tuesday and none of them is a contract.
At 3:30 p.m. the Corps of Engineers Great Lakes and Ohio River Division announced an upcoming competition for the Fort Campbell aircraft maintenance hangar, to be run as an Other Transaction agreement for a prototype project under 10 U.S.C. § 4022.
Seventy-seven minutes later the Southwestern Division posted sources sought for OTA construction of an 8,000 square foot non-destructive testing facility at Red River Army Depot.
Eight minutes after that, NAVFAC Atlantic amended its solicitation for Navy child development centers, titled, in full, "Industrialized Construction (IC) Projects via Other Transaction Authority (10 U.S.C. § 2808a)."
Eighty-three minutes later the same command revised the area of interest for MCI East barracks under the same section.
Two commands, one afternoon, two different statutes, and four pieces of military construction routed outside the FAR.
Zero for nineteen months, then this
We pulled every DoD solicitation, sources-sought, presolicitation, special notice and justification carrying a construction NAICS code published since October 2024. That is 10,458 notices.
Then we counted the ones whose title or posted description names an Other Transaction.
Thirty-six. And the distribution is the whole story (chart below).
The series sits at zero in 19 of the 25 months. One stray Air Force demolition market-research notice in April 2025, one in May 2026, one in June 2026.
Then 6 in July, 6 in August, 8 in September, and 13 since October 1.
October 12 was Columbus Day, so those thirteen landed in eight business days. As a share of construction notice volume it runs 7.8% of October's 166, against 1.2% last quarter and 0.13% the quarter before.
Treat 36 as a floor. SAM's search payload returns "See attached PDF" for a large share of these notices, so an Other Transaction named only inside an attachment never matches.
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