DOGE's First 100 Days: $9.78B in No-Bid Contracts. Every Vendor Was Connected.

We pulled every no-bid or sole-source award posted between January 10 and March 18, 2025 — the first 60 days of the new administration. 21 awards. $9.8 billion. Zero competitive bids.Every dollar went to a vendor with documented political ties to the administration. This is what "streamlined procurement" looks like.

The Method

The Federal Acquisition Regulation allows non-competitive contracting under seven exceptions (urgency, sole source, national security, etc.). Federal law still requires that the contract be justified and documented — even when no other vendor is invited to bid. This is the dataset we pulled: every award in our database where competition_status was either no_bid or sole_source, posted in the first 60 days of 2025, regardless of agency or stated justification.

We then matched each recipient against our political-connection registry, which catalogues ties to Trump administration officials, Musk-aligned networks, and known procurement-related parties. The full registry is published at /influence.

The numbers below are pulled live from the same database used by our Spending Dashboard. The data updates nightly from USAspending.gov.

The Full List, Ranked

By Connection

Of the 21 awards, every single one went to a vendor our registry flags as politically connected. The breakdown:

• Musk network (9 awards): $4,561M — SpaceX, Tesla, xAI, CoreWeave, Scale AI
• Trump allies (10 awards): $4,972M — Palantir, Lockheed, Booz Allen, L3Harris, OpenAI, Oracle, CrowdStrike, Anduril, Huntington Ingalls
• Trump family (1 award): $0M — Trump Winery, USDA wine procurement
• Related party (1 award): $245M — TransDigm (decades-long sole-source military parts vendor)

By Agency

The Department of Defense absorbed the largest share — nine awards totaling roughly $5.56 billion. But the pattern at civilian agencies is just as striking: the General Services Administration handed $1.25 billion to three vendors (Tesla, OpenAI, Oracle) without competitive bidding. The Department of Energy handed $648 million to two AI compute vendors (CoreWeave, xAI) on the same logic.

• Department of Defense — 9 awards · $5.56B · 57% of total
• Department of Homeland Security — 3 awards · $2.11B · Palantir (×2) + Anduril
• General Services Administration — 3 awards · $1.25B · Tesla, OpenAI, Oracle
• Department of Energy — 3 awards · $648M · CoreWeave, xAI (×2)
• Department of Veterans Affairs — 1 award · $175M · Tesla Federal Solutions
• Department of Education — 1 award · $28M · xAI Education
• Department of Agriculture — 1 award · $400K · Trump Winery

What This Tells Us

Federal procurement law assumes that a no-bid contract requires justification — that "only one responsible source" or "urgency" or "national security" be documented before the contracting officer can skip the competitive process. The full text of those justifications is published in JTF (Justification & Approval) documents and is supposed to be auditable.

In the first 60 days, 21 awards totaling $9.78 billion cleared this audit process. Every one of them went to a vendor on our political-connection registry. None of them appear to have been delayed or contested by the relevant Office of Inspector General, despite the obvious pattern.

The question is not whether any single contract was improper. Some of these awards — the submarine maintenance, the Navy helicopter production, the FAA-rated space launch services — have legitimate sole-source justification. The question is whether the pattern reflects a procurement environment in which the justifications are being written first and the contracts second. When the same families of vendors receive the same kinds of awards from the same agencies in the same window, the JTF process has stopped functioning as a check.

We will continue to track every no-bid award published in 2026 and compare the recipient mix to prior administrations. The Spending Dashboard updates nightly from USAspending.gov.