The Government Publishes Your Single-Source List

On June 9 the Defense Logistics Agency placed an order for sodium tungstate with a company in Madisonville, Kentucky. The order is worth $2,988,300, small enough to disappear inside the stockpile's own totals.

Two things make it worth your afternoon. It carries NAICS 325180, other basic inorganic chemical manufacturing, the only order in this year's stockpile book filed under chemical manufacturing at all.

And the contracting officer recorded the solicitation procedure as only one source.

We pulled every delivery order the DLA Strategic Materials office signed in fiscal 2026 and put them side by side. Fourteen orders, $313.1 million obligated, and nine of the fourteen went out uncompeted on a one-source justification (chart below).

Those nine carry $275.4 million, or 88.0% of the dollars. Cobalt alone, one order to Glencore on May 15, is 67.2% of the year.

What the Flag Does and Doesn't Say

The federal procurement record is not a market study. When a file reads NOT COMPETED with a solicitation procedure of ONLY ONE SOURCE, that is a contracting officer's written justification for skipping competition, and the standard it has to meet is the government's own requirement rather than the world's supply. The acid-grade fluorspar order to Ares, which we wrote about this morning, is flagged under FAR 6.302-3, mobilization and essential R&D, which is a different door again.

So read it as a qualification signal rather than a census. Someone with a five-year horizon, a nine-figure authorization and a documented duty to justify every uncompeted award went looking for a second qualified supplier of these eleven materials, wrote down what they found, and had to publish it.