$2.96T in federal grant obligations surveyed, 66 concentration findings surfaced from USAspending.gov.
grants-engine ingested 1,000 federal awards (assistance types 02-05, calendar year 2024) from USAspending.gov public data, covering 321 distinct recipients across 15 federal agencies. Tier 1 ran a single deterministic pass against the recipient-concentration check and produced 66 findings (39 critical, 27 high). California's Department of Health Care Services holds 21.36% of all HHS grant obligations across the surveyed window ($511.7B). Amtrak holds 39.33% of all DOT grant obligations ($36.1B). Real federal data, real findings, replayable with the published code version and the same source register.
USAspending.gov, real federal grant data.
Source. The U.S. Treasury publishes every federal award through USAspending.gov, the federally-mandated public reporting system for federal spending. The search API exposes assistance award types 02 (block grant), 03 (formula grant), 04 (project grant), and 05 (cooperative agreement) at api.usaspending.gov/api/v2/search/spending_by_award/. No authentication required, full query coverage, cited as the authoritative federal record.
What we ingested. 10 pages of 100 awards each, sorted by Award Amount descending, time period January 1 to December 31 2024. Loaded into grants.federal_awards with content-addressable hashes for replay.
What is concentration. A (awarding_agency, recipient_uei) pair is flagged when one recipient receives more than the configured percentage of an agency's total obligations across all surveyed recipients AND exceeds the configured dollar floor. Defaults: 5 percent share, $5,000,000 floor. Severity scales with both share and absolute dollar exposure.
Why this matters. 2 CFR 200 (Uniform Guidance) imposes competition, cost-allowability, and single-audit requirements that scale with both the size of the award and the size of the recipient relative to the agency's grant pool. OMB Circular A-133 routes recipients above defined thresholds into the cognizant agency for single-audit oversight. GAO Yellow Book applies. The public register is the single common reference point for inspectors general, oversight committees, and recipients themselves.
Top of the concentration list, sorted by total agency obligation.
Each row below ran gr_recipient_concentration (Recipient Concentration Risk) against the live ingested federal awards. Severity threshold: critical at 50 percent share OR $1B+, high at 20 percent OR $100M+, medium at 10 percent OR $25M+. The top of the list is dominated by state Medicaid administrators and large transit / emergency-management entities; one large defense-research consortium appears at #24.
| # | Recipient | Awarding Agency | Share | Total obligation | Awards | Tier 1 signals |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | CA Health Care Services | HHS | 21.36% | $511,706,412,484 | 13 | CONCENTRATION-CRITICALDOLLAR-CRITICALMEDICAID-BLOCK |
| 2 | NYS Department of Health | HHS | 10.23% | $245,142,978,462 | 10 | CONCENTRATION-CRITICALDOLLAR-CRITICALMEDICAID-BLOCK |
| 3 | Governor's Authorized Representative | DHS | 19.04% | $39,118,357,326 | 5 | CONCENTRATION-CRITICALDOLLAR-CRITICALDISASTER-RELIEF |
| 4 | National Railroad Passenger Corp (Amtrak) | DOT | 39.33% | $36,084,922,117 | 12 | CONCENTRATION-CRITICALDOLLAR-CRITICALDEDICATED-RECIPIENT |
| 5 | NYS Homeland Security & Emergency Services | DHS | 16.39% | $33,681,467,747 | 5 | CONCENTRATION-CRITICALDOLLAR-CRITICALDISASTER-RELIEF |
| 6 | Government of the Virgin Islands | DHS | 10.70% | $21,984,671,341 | 1 | CONCENTRATION-CRITICALDOLLAR-CRITICALSINGLE-AWARD |
| 7 | CA Department of Education | USDA | 16.30% | $19,505,444,925 | 10 | CONCENTRATION-CRITICALDOLLAR-CRITICALSCHOOL-NUTRITION |
| 8 | CA Office of Emergency Services | DHS | 9.39% | $19,299,534,343 | 7 | CONCENTRATION-CRITICALDOLLAR-CRITICALDISASTER-RELIEF |
| 9 | Metropolitan Transportation Authority | DOT | 20.49% | $18,802,241,437 | 10 | CONCENTRATION-CRITICALDOLLAR-CRITICALTRANSIT |
| 10 | TX Department of Agriculture | USDA | 14.11% | $16,889,133,594 | 8 | CONCENTRATION-CRITICALDOLLAR-CRITICALSCHOOL-NUTRITION |
| 11 | FL Division of Emergency Management | DHS | 7.31% | $15,027,957,775 | 9 | CONCENTRATION-CRITICALDOLLAR-CRITICALDISASTER-RELIEF |
| 12 | TX Division of Emergency Management | DHS | 7.03% | $14,444,005,166 | 2 | CONCENTRATION-CRITICALDOLLAR-CRITICALDISASTER-RELIEF |
| 13 | PR Homeland Security & Emergency | DHS | 6.19% | $12,726,652,837 | 6 | CONCENTRATION-CRITICALDOLLAR-CRITICALDISASTER-RELIEF |
| 14 | CA Department of Social Services | USDA | 7.78% | $9,316,574,577 | 11 | CONCENTRATION-CRITICALDOLLAR-HIGHSNAP |
| 15 | TX Education Agency | Education | 17.80% | $8,498,930,217 | 6 | CONCENTRATION-CRITICALDOLLAR-HIGHTITLE-I |
| 16 | NYS Education Department | USDA | 5.90% | $7,063,410,086 | 7 | CONCENTRATION-CRITICALDOLLAR-HIGHSCHOOL-NUTRITION |
| 17 | CA Department of Education | Education | 14.77% | $7,051,015,763 | 4 | CONCENTRATION-CRITICALDOLLAR-HIGHTITLE-I |
| 18 | Climate United Fund | EPA | 28.94% | $6,970,000,000 | 1 | CONCENTRATION-CRITICALDOLLAR-HIGHGGRF |
| 19 | NYS Education Department | Education | 13.55% | $6,471,615,370 | 6 | CONCENTRATION-CRITICALDOLLAR-HIGHTITLE-I |
| 20 | FL Department of Agriculture | USDA | 5.03% | $6,019,787,140 | 5 | CONCENTRATION-CRITICALDOLLAR-HIGHSCHOOL-NUTRITION |
| 21 | New Jersey Transit Corp | DOT | 6.17% | $5,665,981,229 | 7 | CONCENTRATION-CRITICALDOLLAR-HIGHTRANSIT |
| 22 | Coalition for Green Capital | EPA | 20.76% | $5,000,000,000 | 1 | CONCENTRATION-CRITICALDOLLAR-HIGHGGRF |
| 23 | IL State Board of Education | Education | 7.83% | $3,737,730,254 | 6 | CONCENTRATION-CRITICALDOLLAR-HIGHTITLE-I |
| 24 | National Center for Manufacturing Sciences | DoD | 43.74% | $3,386,262,787 | 3 | CONCENTRATION-CRITICALDOLLAR-HIGHRESEARCH-CONSORTIUM |
| 25 | TX Comptroller of Public Accounts | Commerce | 8.97% | $3,312,616,455 | 1 | CONCENTRATION-CRITICALDOLLAR-HIGHSINGLE-AWARD |
Where the dollars sit.
grants-engine produces a finding per (agency, recipient) pair that crosses the concentration threshold. Severity scales with both share percent and absolute obligation: critical at 50 percent share OR $1B+, high at 20 percent OR $100M+, medium at 10 percent OR $25M+, low otherwise. The 66 findings ingested across 15 federal agencies surface every meaningful concentration in the top-1000 awards population.
39 critical (severity = 'critical')
50 percent share OR $1B+ obligation. Headlines: CA Health Care Services 21.36% / $511.7B (HHS), NYS DOH 10.23% / $245.1B (HHS), GAR 19.04% / $39.1B (DHS), Amtrak 39.33% / $36.1B (DOT). State Medicaid + disaster-relief cohort dominates.
27 high (severity = 'high')
20 percent OR $100M+ exposure. State education agencies (TX TEA, IL ISBE), state agriculture departments (TX TDA, FL FDACS), regional transit (NJ Transit, MTA), GGRF awardees (Climate United, Coalition for Green Capital).
0 medium / 0 low
The dollar floor at $5M and the share floor at 5% kept the long tail out of the run. Lowering the floor surfaces an additional ~200 findings at the medium / low tier; the engine caps to top 500 in any single pass.
What ships when an OIG / IG-staff buyer engages.
Recipient concentration is one signal of three. grants-engine ships two additional production checks gated on the customer profile lob = 'federal_grants_oversight'. Each check runs deterministically against USAspending.gov public data and / or customer-supplied contract modification records, and produces sealed CREB output through the same orchestrator and Ava layer that powers the rest of the platform.
gr_recipient_concentration
Single recipient holds an outsized share of an agency's grant pool. Pattern signal for sole-source awards that should have been competed, capture relationships, or pass-through structures. 2 CFR 200, GAO Yellow Book, OMB Circular A-133.
gr_repeat_prime_to_sub
Identical recipient_uei appears as both prime award holder and parent award holder across distinct awards. Pattern signal for self-subcontracting, layered intermediaries, or administrative-fee skimming on a chain the recipient controls. 2 CFR 200, False Claims Act 31 USC 3729.
gr_period_overrun
action_date past period_of_performance_end OR total_obligation materially exceeds the sum of federal_action_obligation across siblings sharing the same prime_award_id. Pattern signal for unrecorded modifications or scope expansion outside competition. 2 CFR 200.308, FAR 43, OMB A-11.
What the OIG takes to a single-audit referral.
One of the 39 critical findings, rendered as a sealed CREB record. The bundle carries the cryptographic finding hash, the exact reproducibility manifest, and the regulatory-basis citations.
Deterministic, reproducible, court-defensible.
Deterministic
The check is a SQL aggregate over a public federal dataset. Same input register (USAspending.gov), same threshold parameters, same (awarding_agency, recipient_uei) cohort, every run.
No external LLM
The Tier 1 verdict path is rule-based. Ava (next layer) groups, narrates, and routes; it never produces the underlying flag. JIL operates the in-house LLM directly on customer-controlled hardware. No OpenAI, Anthropic, or Vertex API.
Replay manifest
Every CREB carries the source-dataset hash, code version, query parameters, and signal thresholds. A third party with the same inputs replays the analysis bit-identically and lands on the same finding set.
One kernel. Eight industries. This vertical runs on the same sovereign L1 + attestation network that ships the other 7. Kernel age: 18+ months. Adding a vertical: ~1 week. Competitor moat: build the kernel first.