Federal Contracting Intelligence Briefing — May 2026

The headline of the May data window is concentration at the top and one large mover underneath it. Federal construction and facilities spending leads every sector at $155.9B, and the single biggest shift this cycle is a surge in DHS border-construction obligations that pushed the department to roughly $48.8B — up sharply from the prior window. Healthcare ($55.1B), IT ($42.2B), R&D ($37.3B), and cybersecurity ($7.2B) all grew on the new trailing-12 basis.

May 2026 Market Update

SCOUT's May window reflects a complete trailing-12-month view of federal prime-contract obligations (May 27, 2025 – Apr 23, 2026), filtered to obligations only with a $100K floor and IDIQ/IDV base vehicles excluded. The most useful way to read the market at this altitude is by sector — the table below shows each sector under its authoritative PSC or OMB Category scope (what the government actually bought), with the trailing-12 obligation total and award count.

One discipline note before reading across the table: these scopes overlap by design — cybersecurity PSCs sit inside the IT category, for example — so they should never be summed to a federal total. Each is the right denominator for its own sector, not a slice of one pie.

The Mover: A DHS Border-Construction Surge

The clearest signal in the May window is at the Department of Homeland Security. DHS obligations climbed to roughly $48.8B over the trailing twelve months, a sharp jump from the prior window — and the driver is construction, not IT. Measured by what was actually bought — PSC Y-series (Construction of Structures and Facilities), the authoritative spending lens — DHS is now the #1 buyer of new construction in government at $22.4B, ahead of DoD's $13.0B, a reversal from the historical pattern. (DoD and DOE still lead the broader Facilities & Construction category, but via facility operations and national-lab M&O — DHS leads new builds.) The obligations concentrate in a small set of border-barrier and port-of-entry primes: Fisher Sand & Gravel, BCCG (a joint venture), Barnard Construction, and Spencer Construction together account for the bulk of the top of the table.

For BD teams, the practical read: heavy-civil and vertical-construction capacity, bonding, and CBP/USACE past performance are the gating qualifications for the largest dollars right now, and the concentration at the top means the realistic small-and-mid-tier lane is subcontracting and specialty trades behind the barrier primes. It also makes DHS construction a recompete cluster worth watching as these large, fast-obligating awards mature.

Where Else the Money Moved

Construction & infrastructure ($155.9B) remains the single largest sector — DoD military construction and facility ops, DOE national-laboratory facility contracts, and the DHS border work together define it. National-lab management-and-operations primes (Triad/Los Alamos, Sandia, Consolidated Nuclear Security, Savannah River) sit at the top alongside the border contractors.

Healthcare & medical ($55.1B) is dominated by the VA — community-care networks (Optum Public Sector at $18.3B, TriWest) and federal pharmacy distribution (McKesson at $10.6B) drive a highly concentrated market. DoD TRICARE support follows. The recompete risk in VA community care and managed-care contracts is material and worth tracking.

IT & software ($42.2B) stays DoD-led, with VA, GSA, DHS, and HHS each between roughly $2.9B and $6.3B. Strict cybersecurity (PSC DA10) rose to $7.2B, led by VA and DoD, with a long tail of specialists below the top primes — the top ten awardees hold under 40% of DA10 obligations, one of the more open competitive fields in the federal IT stack.

R&D ($37.3B) is the most concentrated by buyer: DoD and NASA together account for roughly 94% of the category, with Lockheed Martin the single largest R&D awardee. Logistics ($11.0B) continues to be reshaped by space launch — SpaceX and ULA together hold the largest obligation pocket under the PSC V-series.

Recompete & Vehicle Watch

On the governmentwide vehicles, OASIS+ and SEWP continue to carry the bulk of trackable task-order flow, while the two newest GWACs — Alliant 3 (large-business IT) and CIO-SP4 (health IT) — remain in early ramp, with only a handful of task orders obligated so far. For on-contract holders, that early-ramp window is the opportunity: task-order competition on both vehicles will accelerate through 2026, and first-mover past performance compounds. SCOUT's recompete pipeline tracks period-of-performance end dates across these vehicles independent of the obligation-reporting lag, so the forward pipeline is visible even where recent awards haven't fully surfaced in spending data yet.

Data, Methodology & Cadence

Every figure in this briefing is a prime-contract obligation total from PrimeRFP SCOUT's USASpending extract, over the trailing twelve months ending April 23, 2026, with a $100K floor and IDIQ/IDV base vehicles excluded. Because the scope, window, and floor are published, any headline here can be reconstructed directly in USASpending Advanced Search — the sector scopes are PSC- or OMB-Category-based, and the per-page figures on the intelligence hub disclose their exact filter block.

A note on rigor that sits behind these numbers: each headline is validated against USASpending before it's published, and any figure that doesn't reconcile cleanly is held back rather than shipped. We would rather publish a slightly smaller, fully reconcilable set of numbers than a larger one we can't stand behind — that standard is the whole point of putting the filter block on every page.

This is a monthly cadence. The hub re-pulls on each USASpending data load; the next refresh — and the next briefing — follows the June 7 data load, which will extend the trailing-12 window forward by roughly a month and capture the next wave of agency reporting. Want the full per-sector and per-agency detail with top awardees and the recompete pipeline? Explore the Federal Contract Intelligence Hub.