About $9.44B from the Navy to the Department of Energy — the recipient is a federal department rather than a company, on a thirty-year contract running 1996 to 2027, its description still holding a legacy raw record

1The recipient is not a company

In federal contract records the recipient field usually carries a company name. Here it carries the name of a federal department, the Department of Energy. The award comes from the Navy, and the name of Naval Sea Systems Command survives in the description field as the awarding office.

Arrangements between agencies being recorded in contract form does occur in federal spending data. The reason for it, and the substance of the arrangement, are not written in this record. What the record supports is that about $9,438.25 million stands obligated as seen from the Navy side.

2A period longer than thirty years

The period runs from 1996-11-04 to 2027-09-30, beyond thirty years. Among the 207 Department of Defense contracts this site holds as of 2026-08-31, records beginning in the 1990s can be counted on one hand.

Outlays are recorded as zero, but that cannot be read as nothing having been paid. Of the same 207, outlays are zero on 115, and 62 of those are already past their end date. By start year, 12 of the 13 contracts beginning in 2023 are at zero, while nearly all of those beginning between 1999 and 2007 are also at zero.

Two separate situations — new contracts still to be paid, and older contracts whose outlays are not carried in the current reporting arrangement — surface as the same value of zero.

3A trace of the older system survives in the description

This record carries, in place of a description, a fixed-width record separated by exclamation marks. Lined up in it are what looks like a fiscal year, 199712, the name of the awarding office, the contract number, the modification number, start and end dates, and the recipient address.

In current records the description field usually carries the content of the procurement in prose. On contracts from the 1990s, a line from the procurement data system of the time appears to have been carried across intact. Keep data over a long span and generations of format mix. Any aggregation has to assume that the contents of a field can be a different thing depending on the generation.