Seventeen years of work described by one word: TEST — an Army contract of $3.50 billion
An Army contract signed in October 2003 and closed on 30 September 2020, obligating about $3.50 billion. Its description field holds four characters: TEST. The record never says what the work was.
Contract key facts
- RecipientARMY SUSTAINMENT LLC
- Contract value$3,501,851,264 (≈$3.5B)
- BranchArmy
- Awarding agencyDepartment of Defense
- Awarding sub-agencyDepartment of the Army
- Award typeDEFINITIVE CONTRACT
- Period of performance2003-10-01 〜 2020-09-30
- Contract ID (PIID)DAAH2303C0345
Contract scope (original)
TEST
Key points
- Signed by the Department of the Army on 1 October 2003 and closed on 30 September 2020 for about $3.50 billion.
- The period ran exactly seventeen years, yet the description field holds only the four characters TEST.
- Among the Defense Department contracts kept here, 15 have an empty description and 26 have twenty characters or fewer.
- Because a value is present, aggregates count this record as having a description.
1The description field says TEST
The previous article looked at what the money fields fail to say. This one looks at the description. What this contract carries there is four characters: TEST.
2Harder to read than a blank
Records without a description are not unusual. Of the 208 Defense Department contracts this site holds as of 2026-09-05, 15 have an empty description and 26 have one of twenty characters or fewer. But a blank and the word TEST put a reader in different positions.
Having a value is what makes the judgement harder. In any count of records with a description, this one is on the wrong side of the line.
3The other fields carry what the description does not
When the description is unusable, the remaining fields are the handles. The order came from the Department of the Army, the recipient is Army Sustainment LLC, the period ran seventeen years, and about $3.50 billion was obligated. Scale, duration and buyer are all legible; only the subject is missing.
The next article takes up a contract whose description still carries a fragment of an accounting code.
Why it matters
Fields within a public dataset differ in reliability. Because human-entered fields such as descriptions can be blank or hold working values, aggregation and search should never assume that a present value means meaningful content.
FAQ
What does TEST refer to?
Are unusable descriptions common?
How should a contract with no stated subject be used?
Sources (primary)
This article is an independent organization based on the U.S. official spending data below. Verify the exact, latest details with the official source.
- USAspending (award details)
- Contract ID (PIID)：DAAH2303C0345