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.
If you build your two-year expiring board by filtering USAspending on the Navy, the Air Force and the Army, you have a tidy list with a $49.6 billion hole in it.
Our pipeline refreshed this morning: 1,211 DoD prime contracts over $50 million whose period of performance ends between February 2027 and August 2028, $410.6 billion obligated. Sort that by awarding sub-agency and the fourth-biggest name, sitting right behind the three services and well ahead of MDA, is the Defense Contract Management Agency (chart below).
DCMA has never competed a dollar of it. Its own description of the job is "contract administration services," some 300,000 contracts and $8.5 trillion across roughly 18,000 contractor locations, from pre-award through sustainment.
Twenty-seven rows carry the whole 12.1%.
Where That Money Actually Comes From
We pulled all 27 award by award. Every one shows a DCMA field office in the awarding-office field and the real buying command in the funding-office field.
The single largest line on the entire expiring board is one of them. N0001920C0009, Lockheed Martin, F-35A LRIP 15, $30.14 billion obligated, ending June 1, 2028.
Awarding office: DCMA Fixed Wing Fort Worth. Funding office: Naval Air Systems Command.
The pattern holds all the way down:
- FA880708C0010, GPS IIIA, $4.55B, awarded under DCMA Space Enterprise, funded by FA8807 at Space Systems Command.
- FA867515C0022, AMRAAM production, $1.77B, under DCMA Missiles, funded by AFLCMC EBAK.
- FA813425F0001, Boeing's E-4B contractor logistics, $80.5M, under DCMA AIMO San Antonio, funded by OC-ALC.
Put the funding office back where it belongs and the $49.6 billion redistributes cleanly. Navy $41.2B across 15 rows, Air Force $8.3B across 11, Army $148 million on one (Boeing's CH-47 Lot 4 long lead).
These are all old contracts, which is the tell. GPS IIIA started May 15, 2008 and is still running.
Administration got delegated somewhere along the way, and the award record now points at the office holding the file rather than the office that bought the thing.
Most of It Was Never Yours Anyway
Here's the catch, and it's worth saying plainly: 24 of the 27 rows, $44.0 billion, come back NOT COMPETED.
F-35 production, F-35 global sustainment, AMRAAM, the Raytheon integration work. Nobody was flipping those.
So the filter really costs you two rows.
They happen to be the two you wanted.
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