Award velocity over the last 90 days is bimodal across the civilian agencies. DoD and VA are roughly flat against their FY24 same-period baselines. HHS, DHS, and the Department of Commerce are down 18% to 31% on obligated dollars. The bimodal pattern is the story.
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.
-31%
Department of Commerce obligated dollars vs. FY24 Q2
— USASpending.gov, pulled 2026-05-04
What the bimodal pattern means for pipeline planning
Pipelines built against an even cross-agency baseline are now under-weighting the agencies still cutting and over-weighting the agencies that have paused. The correction is mechanical: re-baseline weekly, not quarterly, for the rest of FY26.
“We rebuilt our pipeline weighting in March against a flat baseline. We were wrong by April. We will not be wrong again in May.”— 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.
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.
