Federal Spending Report — Week of 2026-09-13
Federal Spending Report: September 13–19, 2026
The federal government obligated $488,000 across 14 awards during the week of September 13–19, 2026, with the Department of Health and Human Services and Department of Agriculture accounting for all activity. The spending reflected a heavy emphasis on research grants, with 13 of 14 awards structured as grants rather than direct payments.
The largest single award went to Breese Associates, L.P., which received $119,000 as a direct payment from the Department of Agriculture in Illinois. The transaction stands as an outlier in the week's spending pattern, representing the only non-grant award and comprising nearly one-quarter of total obligated funds. Research institutions dominated the remaining top awards, with the Pennington Biomedical Research Center securing $80,000 from HHS in Louisiana, followed by Northwestern University ($45,000), UCLA ($43,000), and Harvard ($38,000)—all grant recipients.
Illinois led all states with $164,000 across two awards, driven primarily by the Breese Associates payment. Louisiana, California, and Massachusetts each received single awards in the $38,000–$80,000 range, while North Carolina appeared twice with $38,000 in combined funding. One contractor received $94,000 across seven separate awards but has been redacted due to personally identifiable information restrictions.
HHS concentrated its activity on research grants, obligating $275,000 across six awards, primarily to academic medical centers and research institutions. The Department of Agriculture, by contrast, distributed $213,000 across eight awards, with the Breese Associates direct payment comprising the bulk of its spending. The divergence in agency approach—HHS favoring concentrated grants to major research centers versus Agriculture's more distributed funding model—reflects differing operational priorities.
Grants accounted for 75 percent of total spending by award count and 76 percent by dollar value, underscoring federal emphasis on research over direct contracting during this period. The concentration of HHS funding among top-tier research universities—Northwestern, UCLA, and Harvard—suggests a focus on competitive academic research, while Agriculture's broader contractor base points to more varied programmatic needs.