In Fort Worth, thousands of Texans build the F-35 fighter at a Lockheed Martin plant that has anchored the local economy for generations. That single Texas facility is part of why a national pattern lands close to home: as of mid-2026, the ten largest recipients of federal contract dollars collectively pull in more in prime contract obligations than the combined total flowing to 38 states and the District of Columbia, according to data reported through USAspending.gov, the U.S. Treasury’s official spending tracker.
The gap is not a rounding error, and it is not new. It reflects decades of consolidation in defense and technology that funneled an outsized share of taxpayer-funded procurement to a shrinking pool of corporate giants — several of which employ large numbers of Texans. Here is how to read the figure responsibly, and where Texas fits.
The ten companies at the top
USAspending.gov aggregates awards to parent companies, rolling subsidiary obligations up to the corporate-family level. Using that parent-level view, the top federal contract recipients in recent years have consistently included Lockheed Martin, RTX Corporation (formerly Raytheon Technologies), General Dynamics, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Humana, L3Harris Technologies, Leidos, Huntington Ingalls Industries, and BAE Systems.
Exact figures shift depending on when the data is pulled, because the Department of Defense reports on a delay that can leave recent obligations temporarily unrecorded. The Custom Award Data Download Center notes this lag explicitly. Still, the ranking has been remarkably stable: the same handful of defense primes plus a few health-care and IT conglomerates have dominated for years.
The Texas connection
Several of these firms have substantial Texas operations. Lockheed Martin’s Aeronautics division in Fort Worth is one of the state’s signature manufacturing employers, building the F-35. Other major contractors operate engineering, services, and support sites across the state. That means a meaningful slice of the dollars counted in the top-10 total is performed by Texas workers at Texas facilities — a reminder that “contractor concentration” is not an abstraction here but local payroll.
It also illustrates a subtlety in the data, discussed below: a Lockheed Martin facility in Fort Worth generates contract dollars that count toward both the Lockheed Martin parent total and the Texas state total. There is no double-counting in the system, but the corporate view and the geographic view measure different things.
Why the parent-company view matters
Lockheed Martin is not one office writing one contract; it is a corporate family of dozens of subsidiaries, from Sikorsky helicopters to the Skunk Works advanced-development division. When any subsidiary wins an award, USAspending.gov attributes the dollars to the parent. The same logic applies to RTX (Raytheon, Pratt & Whitney, Collins Aerospace) and General Dynamics (Bath Iron Works, Gulfstream, and more). The platform’s spending guide documents the identifiers that make this roll-up possible. It is a defensible way to track where money lands — but it means a top-10 “company” is really a constellation of legal entities operating across many states.
How 38 states fall short
State-level totals on USAspending.gov are calculated by place of performance or the recipient’s registered address. By that measure, smaller states such as Wyoming, Vermont, South Dakota, and Montana each receive well under $2 billion in federal contract obligations per year, and even mid-sized states land in the single-digit billions. Stack the bottom 38 together and the combined total still falls short of what the top 10 parent companies receive. The comparison isn’t perfectly apples-to-apples — corporate reach versus geographic distribution — but the platform’s filter guide lets users build both breakdowns.
Concentration has been building for decades
The defense industry looked very different in the early 1990s, when roughly 50 major prime contractors competed for Pentagon work. A wave of mergers — encouraged in part at a 1993 meeting of industry leaders that became known as the “Last Supper” — shrank the field dramatically. By the 2000s, five firms commanded the bulk of defense procurement, and later deals (the 2020 Raytheon–United Technologies merger creating RTX, and Northrop Grumman’s 2018 acquisition of Orbital ATK) continued the trend. The Government Accountability Office has found the share of defense dollars going to the largest contractors has grown steadily, and has flagged concerns about reduced competition, higher costs, and supply-chain fragility.
What it means for small business — and Texas taxpayers
Federal law sets a government-wide goal of awarding at least 23% of prime contract dollars to small businesses, and the Small Business Administration has reported agencies meeting that target in recent years. But analysts told congressional panels that “contract bundling” — combining smaller requirements into large multiyear awards — effectively prices out small and mid-sized competitors, including many Texas firms. Research has found the number of vendors in the defense industrial base declined by roughly 40% over two decades. Fewer bidders can mean less price discipline, an outcome that ultimately affects the taxpayers funding the contracts.
For Texas specifically, there’s a way to see the state’s own slice of this. Using the geographic filter on USAspending.gov, you can pull the total federal contract dollars with a Texas place of performance and see which programs and which prime contractors account for the largest shares. The state consistently ranks among the top recipients of federal contract dollars nationally, driven by its defense manufacturing base, its military installations, and its large aerospace and IT-services footprint. That makes Texas a net beneficiary of the very concentration the headline figure describes — the dollars flowing to a handful of corporate giants include payroll for tens of thousands of Texans. The same data lets a curious resident check exactly how much, rather than taking anyone’s characterization on faith.
How to verify the numbers yourself
This is not a claim you have to take on faith. Anyone can reproduce a version using free public tools. The USAspending API offers recipient-hierarchy endpoints that return parent-level obligation totals, and a parallel query using the geographic filter produces state-level totals; comparing the two yields the headline figure. For spreadsheet users, the Custom Award Data Download Center provides bulk CSV extracts by fiscal year — just note the DoD reporting delay and check whether your chosen year is fully reported before treating any figure as final.
Fort Worth is both sides of this story
The concentration is real, reproducible, and grounded in the government’s own data: ten corporate families command more federal contract dollars than most of the country’s states see combined, and the gap shows no sign of narrowing. Fort Worth’s F-35 line is the clearest illustration of why that is double-edged for Texas: the same consolidation that critics say squeezes out smaller competitors is what put a Lockheed Martin final-assembly plant, and the paychecks that come with it, in North Texas rather than somewhere else. Texas small businesses bidding for federal work still run into the bundling barriers described above; Texas workers on a contractor payroll benefit from the exact scale that creates them. What the raw numbers can’t settle is whether the concentration itself is a problem or simply the reality of markets where only a few firms can build a stealth fighter or a nuclear submarine — that argument continues in congressional hearings and GAO audits. The USAspending.gov data just tells you, precinct by precinct, where the money actually goes.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
