# Spending Gap — "Eliminating Waste" vs. the $263 Billion No-Bid Ledger ## The claim The organizing promise of the second term's spending policy is the elimination of waste, fraud, and abuse — the premise beneath [[DOGE]], beneath the [[Office of Management and Budget]]'s impoundment posture, and beneath every rescission package. Competitive bidding is the single most basic anti-waste mechanism the federal government has: it is how the taxpayer discovers the price. ## The ledger In **FY2025**, the federal government awarded roughly **$262.6 billion** noncompetitively — about **one-third of all federal contract dollars**. (A Congressional Research Service count puts FY2025 at about $278 billion.) An earlier version of this card said [[Project On Government Oversight]] projected a FY2026 pace of about $300 billion. No POGO publication stating that figure has been found (checked 2026-09-30); POGO's only published FY2026 number is about $3.6 billion in DHS no-bid awards in the first half of the year. Independent analysis puts the cost of no-bid contracting at a **ten-year high**. This is the denominator the individual cards live inside. Each one is a sample from a distribution that is itself the story: | Award | Amount | Recipient | | ----- | ------ | --------- | | Border wall, New Mexico secondary wall (Apr 2026) | $1.6B (no-bid) | [[Barnard Construction]] | | Migrant children's legal services | $150M (single-source) | [[Burke Law Group]] | | Pentagon data services | up to $243.9M (directed) | [[Palantir]] | | East Wing ballroom | up to $500M (no-bid) | see the ballroom card | | Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool | $13.1M (emergency exemption) | see the reflecting-pool card | ## The gap An administration that describes itself as the enemy of wasteful spending is, by the government's own contract data, running the least competitive procurement book in a decade. Roughly a dollar in three now skips the mechanism designed to find out whether it is the right price. The rhetorical structure is worth naming precisely: **"waste" is applied to the recipients of federal money and never to the process of awarding it.** Grants, foreign aid, and public broadcasting get the efficiency audit. The contracts get an urgency exemption. Both moves are executed by the same offices in the same fiscal year — [[Rescission and Impoundment]] on the outflow side, other-than-full-and-open competition on the award side. Money is withheld from programs Congress funded and released to vendors nobody bid against. ## Caveats — keep these attached - The $262.6B FY2025 figure and the ~$300B FY2026 pace come from **POGO / OpenTheBooks analysis of FPDS data**, not from an official government report. Attribute; do not present as a government statistic. - **Noncompetitive is not the same as improper.** There are legitimate sole-source categories — genuine emergencies, single qualified suppliers, follow-on production. The story is the *trend line and the missing justifications*, not the existence of the category. - Noncompetitive contracting rose across multiple prior administrations too. The claim is **record level and record share**, not invention. Say it that way. - Consult CRS R48980 for the statutory framework before writing about specific exemptions; the authorities differ by agency and instrument. ## Magnitude $262.6B FY2025 (~33% of all contract dollars) · ~$300B FY2026 pace · ten-year high. ## Receipts - Center for Western Priorities (July 2026): the record-spending analysis. - POGO: the FY2026 projection; Scott Amey's contracting-competition work; the letter to Congress urging true competition. - OpenTheBooks: the $262.6B FY2025 noncompetitive total. - CRS R48980: the statutory framework for other-than-full-and-open competition. - **Pending:** an independent recomputation from FPDS once the host-side USASpending pull is baselined — this card should eventually stand on the vault's own arithmetic. ## Content flag **blog-ready** — and specifically the **spine of the roundup post**. Lead with a named single (Barnard or Burke), then widen to this number so the reader understands they were not shown an anecdote. ## Related [[The Spending Gap]] · [[Spending Gap - Urgency vs. the $1.6B No-Bid Border Wall to a Million-Dollar Donor]] · [[Spending Gap - Legal Representation vs. the $150M No-Bid Award to a Two-Immigration-Lawyer Firm]] · [[Spending Gap - Not Exclusive to Any Vendor vs. the Memo Titled Funding Palantir]] · [[Spending Gap - Efficiency Rhetoric vs. the No-Bid Reflecting Pool Contract]] · [[Spending Gap - Taxpayer-Free vs. the Secret $500M No-Bid Ballroom Contract]] · [[Rescission and Impoundment]] · [[Project On Government Oversight]]