Pulling sole-source 8(a) awards above the simplified acquisition threshold from FPDS for the last six months produces 412 records. Filter to defense IT and one vendor accounts for twelve of the awards across three contracting offices. We re-ran the pull twice to be sure.
We have spent the better part of three months running the underlying obligations data against agency strategic plans and the FY26 President’s Budget Request. The result is less a story than a pattern — and the pattern is not what the trade press has been describing.
12 of 412
Sole-source 8(a) defense IT awards to one vendor, last 6 months
— FPDS, pulled 2026-05-10
Why this concentration is structurally interesting
Twelve awards to one vendor across three contracting offices is not, on its own, irregular. The concentration becomes interesting when you cross-reference the three contracting offices: all three rolled up under the same PEO in 2024.
“The PEO consolidation in 2024 was supposed to create efficiency. What it created was a single buying channel that defaults to a single vendor relationship.”— A contracting officer at a mid-tier civilian agency, speaking on background
What that means for an operator at $5M to $50M in annual federal revenue is unambiguous: the surface area you can reasonably cover is shrinking, and the cost of being wrong about which vehicles to chase has roughly doubled since FY23.
Contrarian
The conventional advice — add more NAICS codes, get on more schedules, hire a former agency PM — is exactly the wrong response to this cycle. Concentration, not coverage, is the only durable answer.
We will keep tracking this through the end of the fiscal year. If the pattern holds through Q4, the implications for the FY27 budget cycle are larger than anything we have written about in the past twelve months.
