WASHINGTON — The Defense Department awarded $252.3 billion in contract obligations without competition in fiscal 2025, 47.9% of the $527 billion it obligated on contracts that year, according to an Inquisitor analysis of federal spending records on USAspending.gov.
That was the largest amount of noncompetitive contract spending in the five fiscal years the Inquisitor reviewed, and $48 billion more than in fiscal 2024, a 23.5% increase. Dollars awarded through competition were essentially flat, slipping 0.7% to $274.6 billion. The increase in noncompetitive awards was larger than the department’s entire $46 billion growth in contract spending.
The share of noncompetitive dollars has kept rising in the incomplete figures reported so far for fiscal 2026, which ended Sept. 30. Of the $439.9 billion in fiscal 2026 obligations posted so far, $215.7 billion, or 49.0%, was not competed. Defense contract data reach USAspending on a 90-day delay, so the fiscal 2026 totals are still growing.
The administration has said it wants more competition, alongside faster buying. President Trump’s April 2025 executive order on defense acquisition said the system “does not provide the speed and flexibility our Armed Forces need” and directed a “first preference for commercial solutions” and a general preference for other transaction agreements. The department’s Acquisition Transformation Strategy, released with memos Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced in November 2025, says the department will “restore innovation, accelerate production, gain negotiating leverage, and more effectively manage cost and schedule growth by promoting competition with lowered barriers to entry.” The same strategy also calls for awarding companies “bigger, longer deals, so they’ll be willing to invest more to grow the industrial base that supplies our weapons.”
Fiscal 2025 ran from Oct. 1, 2024, to Sept. 30, 2025, so it covers the last three and a half months of the Biden administration and the first eight months of the Trump administration.
How the Inquisitor measured it
Every contract action the Pentagon reports to the Federal Procurement Data System carries an “extent competed” code, and USAspending publishes that field. The Inquisitor totaled Defense Department obligations for procurement contracts, purchase orders, delivery orders and blanket purchase agreement calls (USAspending award types A through D) by that code for fiscal years 2021 through 2025.
Awards coded “not competed,” “not available for competition” and “not competed under simplified acquisition procedures” are counted here as noncompetitive. Awards coded “full and open competition,” “full and open competition after exclusion of sources” (such as small-business set-asides), “competed under simplified acquisition procedures” and “follow-on to competed action” are counted as competed. Obligations are money the government legally committed in the year, net of deobligations; they are not contract ceilings. For orders under existing contracts, the field generally reflects how the underlying contract was awarded.
Other transaction agreements, which the executive order favors, are not part of these award types and are not included. The Pentagon calculates its own official competition rates under different rules, so those rates may not match these figures.
| Fiscal year | Total obligations | Not competed | Competed | Share not competed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | $412.8 billion | $198.6 billion | $214.2 billion | 48.1% |
| 2022 | $436.7 billion | $180.1 billion | $256.6 billion | 41.2% |
| 2023 | $490.3 billion | $221.9 billion | $268.4 billion | 45.3% |
| 2024 | $481.0 billion | $204.3 billion | $276.7 billion | 42.5% |
| 2025 | $527.0 billion | $252.3 billion | $274.6 billion | 47.9% |
| 2026 (reported so far) | $439.9 billion | $215.7 billion | $224.1 billion | 49.0% |
The share not competed in fiscal 2025 was just below fiscal 2021’s 48.1%, but the dollar amount was $54 billion higher. Comparing the same six months removes the effect of the reporting lag: from October through March, 50.0% of obligations were not competed in fiscal 2026, up from 48.5% in the same months of fiscal 2025.
Where the growth came from
Almost all of the increase was in one category. Awards coded “not competed” rose from $167.7 billion in fiscal 2024 to $212.7 billion in fiscal 2025, a $45 billion, or 26.8%, jump. Full and open competition fell slightly, to $193.9 billion.
| Code | Fiscal 2024 | Fiscal 2025 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full and open competition | $197.4 billion | $193.9 billion | -1.8% |
| Full and open after exclusion of sources | $67.8 billion | $68.0 billion | +0.2% |
| Competed under simplified acquisition | $11.5 billion | $12.8 billion | +11.8% |
| Not competed | $167.7 billion | $212.7 billion | +26.8% |
| Not available for competition | $32.3 billion | $34.9 billion | +8.0% |
| Not competed under simplified acquisition | $4.4 billion | $4.8 billion | +8.9% |
Noncompetitive contracts are legal when they fit one of the exceptions in the Federal Acquisition Regulation, Part 6.302. The exceptions include cases where only one responsible source can meet the government’s need, unusual and compelling urgency, keeping a vendor available for industrial mobilization, international agreements in which a foreign buyer asks for a particular source, cases authorized or required by statute, national security, and the public interest. Major weapons often fall under the first exception because only one company builds them: Lockheed Martin is the only maker of the F-35, and General Dynamics’ Electric Boat and HII are the only builders of the Navy’s nuclear submarines.
The biggest contractors
The largest weapons makers received most of the noncompetitive money. Lockheed Martin, RTX, General Dynamics, Boeing and Northrop Grumman together accounted for $154.6 billion, or 61.3%, of the department’s noncompetitive contract obligations in fiscal 2025.
| Company | Total DoD obligations | Not competed | Share not competed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lockheed Martin (incl. Sikorsky) | $76.8 billion | $70.1 billion | 91.3% |
| General Dynamics (incl. Electric Boat) | $34.5 billion | $26.6 billion | 77.1% |
| RTX (incl. Raytheon, Pratt & Whitney, Collins) | $33.4 billion | $30.4 billion | 91.0% |
| Boeing | $23.4 billion | $18.9 billion | 80.8% |
| Northrop Grumman | $13.7 billion | $8.6 billion | 62.6% |
| BAE Systems (U.S. units) | $11.4 billion | $7.4 billion | 64.8% |
| HII | $10.3 billion | $5.3 billion | 50.8% |
| L3Harris (incl. Aerojet) | $7.5 billion | $4.9 billion | 65.5% |
| General Electric | $4.0 billion | $3.2 billion | 79.9% |
| Bechtel | $3.2 billion | $2.1 billion | 67.0% |
| General Atomics | $2.5 billion | $2.4 billion | 96.3% |
| Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory | $1.9 billion | $1.9 billion | 98.7% |
Company totals are the Inquisitor’s grouping of USAspending recipient records by name, such as counting Sikorsky with its parent Lockheed Martin, and may differ slightly from figures on each company’s USAspending recipient page. Electric Boat alone received $21.3 billion in noncompetitive obligations in fiscal 2025, the second-largest amount of any single recipient record after a Lockheed Martin Corp. record with $34.1 billion.
Some of the most heavily noncompetitive recipients are research institutions. The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory is a university-affiliated research center, and such centers often receive work under long-term sponsoring arrangements rather than open competition. General Atomics builds the MQ-9 Reaper drone.
The military departments
The Navy had both the largest contract budget and the highest noncompetitive share among the three military departments, reflecting its shipbuilding and submarine programs.
| Component | Total obligations | Not competed | Share not competed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Department of the Navy | $176.6 billion | $112.0 billion | 63.4% |
| Department of the Army | $139.9 billion | $66.1 billion | 47.2% |
| Department of the Air Force (incl. Space Force) | $98.5 billion | $49.5 billion | 50.3% |
| Defense Logistics Agency | $58.3 billion | $12.1 billion | 20.8% |
| Defense Health Agency | $18.4 billion | $2.6 billion | 14.3% |
| Missile Defense Agency | $9.5 billion | $5.3 billion | 56.0% |
| Defense Information Systems Agency | $7.2 billion | $1.0 billion | 13.9% |
| U.S. Special Operations Command | $4.3 billion | $1.6 billion | 36.3% |
The Army’s figure includes recent emergency and sole-source awards for munitions production. In August 2025, for example, the Army issued a $635.2 million sole-source undefinitized contract to MSM Group North America to build an artillery shell plant in Iowa, as the Inquisitor reported Nov. 9. The Navy this week raised the ceiling on a sole-source help-desk contract with General Dynamics Information Technology to $154.5 million, the Inquisitor reported Wednesday.
The Defense Logistics Agency and the Defense Health Agency, which buy fuel, food, medicine, spare parts and health care services, competed most of their contract dollars.
What the numbers do and don’t show
A rising noncompetitive share does not by itself mean the department is paying more than it should. Sole-source awards for systems with only one producer can be the only legal way to buy them, and the acquisition strategy’s call for “bigger, longer deals” points toward larger multiyear buys from existing producers of missiles, munitions and ships, which typically go to the incumbent. Foreign military sales, in which allies buy U.S. weapons through the Pentagon, also often specify a manufacturer.
The figures also do not show competition below the prime contract. The strategy says program executives will “include diverse performers and non-traditional vendors in source selection” and push competition at the component level through a Modular Open Systems Approach, which it says “allows for more competition throughout the programmatic lifecycle, avoiding vendor lock.” Those efforts may not show up in prime-contract competition codes for years.
What the records do show is that in fiscal 2025, the Pentagon’s additional contract dollars went to awards made without competition, and that the share has continued at about half of all contract spending in the first months of fiscal 2026 reported so far.
The Inquisitor will update these tables when the fiscal 2026 data are complete, early next year.
Data note: Figures are Defense Department (awarding agency) obligations for award types A through D, totaled by the “extent competed” field through the USAspending.gov API on Nov. 12, 2026. Fiscal 2026 figures are incomplete because of the department’s 90-day reporting delay.
Featured photo: Plant workers work on an F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. (Cherie Cullen / U.S. Department of Defense, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; cropped)
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