Most Pentagon contracts announced this month that disclosed how they were awarded had a single bidder

By Staff Reporter

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon’s daily contract announcements for the first three weeks of fiscal 2027 describe a department that is mostly not shopping around. Of the 66 awards announced Oct. 1-20 that said how they were competed, 36 were sole-source awards, including orders where only one company was asked to bid, and seven more were competed but drew a single offer, according to a Washington Inquisitor review of all 13 daily announcements posted on war.gov during that period.

Together those 43 single-bidder awards carry $16.00 billion in announced face value, about 71 percent of the $22.64 billion attached to the 66 awards that disclosed their competition. Only 23 awards, worth $6.64 billion, reported receiving more than one offer.

Sole-source contracting is legal and often unavoidable. Federal rules list seven exceptions to full and open competition, from a single qualified supplier to national-security urgency and international agreements, and much of the department’s spending is sustainment of weapons that only their manufacturer can support. But the pattern matters for price: without a rival bid, the government relies on cost and pricing data and negotiation rather than competition to judge whether it is paying a fair price, and the department’s own regulations treat a lone offer on a competitive solicitation as a problem to be fixed, not a success.

What the announcements show

The dollar figure is dominated by two awards to Raytheon. On Oct. 13, the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center announced an $8 billion maximum-ceiling, sole-source contract for modernization and “production restart services” for strategic communications terminals, running to 2036; just $800,000 was obligated at award. On Oct. 8, the Missile Defense Agency announced a “noncompetitive, multi-year undefinitized contract action” for Standard Missile-3 Block IB interceptors with a base value of $4.43 billion and $6.34 billion including options. An undefinitized action lets the contractor start work before the price is final.

Even setting both aside, single-bidder awards outnumber competed ones nearly two to one: 41 of the remaining 64 disclosed awards.

Branch by branch

The Navy accounted for the largest number of sole-source awards, 18, many of them sustainment and engineering orders on existing platforms such as General Electric’s $113 million performance-based logistics deal for T700 engine parts on Navy and Marine Corps helicopters and Raytheon’s $83.8 million APY-10 radar support contract, both announced Oct. 1. The Army was the only military department where competed awards with multiple offers outnumbered single-bidder ones.

The largest single-bidder awards

Competed, but nobody else showed up

The seven awards that were competed but drew one offer are the ones the department’s rules single out. Under Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement 215.371-2, when only one offer arrives on a competitive solicitation that was open fewer than 30 days, the contracting officer must consult the requiring office about loosening the requirement and resolicit for at least 30 more days. The announcements do not say how long these solicitations were open.

The two largest are audit contracts. On Oct. 8, the Defense Finance and Accounting Service announced that Ernst & Young won a $455.4 million contract to audit the Navy General Fund, Marine Corps General Fund and Navy Working Capital Fund for fiscal 2027-2031, and a $414 million contract to audit Air Force financial statements. Each was “the result of a competitive acquisition” in which the government received one quote.

A $307.7 million order with an odd end date

The largest Army single-bidder award came on Oct. 20: a $307.7 million modification to Authentic8 Inc. of Redwood City, California, to establish a department-wide indefinite-delivery contract for its Silo suite of “digital investigation software and services.” The announcement says “one bid was solicited with one received,” meaning the Army sought a bid from only one company. It lists an estimated completion date of Sept. 27, 2026, which had already passed when the award was announced.

A similar date problem appears in the Army’s $22.8 million Transition Assistance Program award to Choctaw Premier Services, announced Oct. 1, which lists an estimated completion date of Oct. 1, 2026, the same day it was announced, while obligating fiscal 2027 funds.

Bridges, labs and foreign sales

Several of the larger sole-source awards are the kind defenders of the practice point to. The Defense Health Agency’s $318 million award to Leidos, announced Oct. 13, is described as a “sole-source bridge” for the MHS GENESIS electronic health record that “will reduce in scope during the 12-month period” as the agency moves to direct relationships with the system’s underlying providers. DARPA’s $499.8 million ceiling award on Oct. 14 went to the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, a university-affiliated research center that the government sponsors to maintain what the announcement calls “an essential capability,” a recognized basis for noncompetitive awards. Two sole-source awards went to nonprofit employers of people with disabilities under the ‘+a(‘https://www.abilityone.gov/’,’AbilityOne program’)+’, a mandatory source of supply for federal agencies.

Seven single-bidder awards involved Foreign Military Sales. Among them: a $38.8 million sole-source contract to General Atomics, announced Oct. 15, for logistics support for Taiwan’s MQ-9B drones.

How this compares

The month’s announcements are a small, skewed sample: they cover only larger awards and orders, and they report ceilings that may never be spent. Government-wide data measure competition by dollars actually obligated. By that measure, the Government Accountability Office reported that defense agencies competed about 56 percent of their contract obligations in fiscal 2024, compared with 84 percent for civilian agencies. The announcements for early October, measured by count, show 45 percent of disclosed awards competed in any form and 35 percent competed with more than one offer.

The early weeks of a fiscal year also skew toward renewals, bridges and options carried over from September, so October alone should not be read as a trend. The Inquisitor plans to repeat the count monthly.

Methodology

The Inquisitor collected all 13 daily contract announcements posted on war.gov from Oct. 1 to Oct. 20, 2026, and coded each of the 96 award paragraphs by the competition language it contains. “Sole source” includes awards described as sole-source, noncompetitive, “not competitively procured,” or in which one bid was solicited. “Competed, one offer” includes awards described as competitive in which one offer, quote, bid or proposal was received. Multiple-award contracts that listed several winners or several offers were coded as competed with multiple offers. Eight corrections and amendments to earlier announcements were excluded, as were 22 awards ($5.07 billion) whose announcements did not describe the competition. Values are the announced face value, maximum or ceiling; for the Missile Defense Agency award the base value was used. Some announcements posted in October cover awards made Sept. 28-30. Findings are counts of announcements, not obligations, and are not directly comparable to government-wide competition statistics.

Photo: The Pentagon. David, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.