The $10 Billion Ceiling That Shows Up Twenty Times

Every contract vehicle sitting under our expiration board reports the same obligated amount.

Zero.

We refreshed the board this afternoon, 1,219 live rows carrying $472,701,313,607.09, and 705 of those rows are task or delivery orders written against a parent vehicle. Those 705 orders hang off 479 distinct vehicles.

We pulled all 479 award records, got a clean 200 on every one, and read the obligated figure off each.

$0.00, four hundred and seventy-nine times out of four hundred and seventy-nine.

The mechanism is ordinary. Money gets obligated on the order, and the vehicle above it carries a field nobody fills. Which leaves one question for anyone sizing a recompete off the vehicle layer:

"If the obligated column is always zero, what are you actually reading?"

The Column You Fall Back To

The ceiling. And 451 of the 479 vehicles do report one, while 28 report nothing at all.

Add those 451 ceilings together and the vehicle layer tells you the work approaching recompete is worth $20,671,887,176,766. That is 43.7x the entire live board underneath it.

The distribution says the rest. Median ceiling is $1,854,119,833, which is a believable number for a mid-sized MAC.

The smallest is $500. The largest is $2,840,238,077,721, sitting on a single Carahsoft Federal Supply Schedule contract that carries exactly one live order on our board, worth $131,688,079.

So the field spans six orders of magnitude and nobody flagged it, because nothing in the system ever adds it up.

The Same Number, Once Per Holder

Here is where it gets structural rather than sloppy. Among the 451 reported ceilings there are only 318 distinct values, and 45 of those values appear on more than one record, covering 178 of the 479 vehicles.

That is a multiple-award program ceiling, written once onto every holder's award record. Sum the holders and you have counted the program once per seat (chart below).

SeaPort-NXG is the cleanest case: 20 separate parent records at NSWC Dahlgren, each reporting $10,000,000,000, each running to 2029-01-01. Add the records and the vehicle layer says $200 billion.

Two more worth knowing before you trust a ceiling again:

• The nine OASIS records on our board report $999,999,999,999 apiece, which is nines in a field, not a ceiling. Summed, they contribute $9.00 trillion. A tenth OASIS record, Credence Management Solutions, reports exactly twice that.
• The $20,000,000,000 cluster is six records, and one of them is not SEWP V at all. It is a NITAAC CIO-SP3 vehicle that happens to carry the identical figure. The ceiling column does not identify a program.