30 Companies Getting the Most From the Government

CalTech is the largest recipient of NASA contracts in the United States. The school received a total of $2.4 billion from NASA in 2017. Much of those contract funds go to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a center located near the university campus that carries out robotic exploration of space. Among the JPL’s spacecraft are the Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars in 2012, the Juno spacecraft currently orbiting Jupiter, and the NuSTAR X-ray space black hole telescope.

Industrial conglomerate Honeywell International won $2.4 billion in federal government contracts in 2017. Still, government dollars account for a relatively small share of the company’s overall revenue. Honeywell reported $41.8 billion in revenue in its most recent fiscal year, nearly 18 times more than the value of its government contracts in 2016.

The majority of the companies making the most from the government are defense contractors, and much of Honeywell’s business is also in defense. Two of the company’s three largest buyers in the government are the Department of Defense and the U.S. Army. The company’s products include avionics and cockpit electronic equipment, navigation tools, engines, and sensors.

Information technology giant CACI won the largest contract in its more than 50 year history in fiscal 2017. The five-year, $1.77 billion contract will fund work on the federal government’s Joint Improvised-Threat Defeat Organization, a program that develops technology aimed at countering car bombs, roadside bombs, and other improvised explosives.

The work has been instrumental in Iraq, where CACI has provided a range of information technology and intelligence services for over a decade. Since the United States entered Iraq in 2003, CACI has largely grown through a combination of acquisitions and increased contract work. CACI reported $4.5 billion in revenue in fiscal 2018, more than five times the revenue reported in 2003.

While most of the companies on this list are military contractors, several are health insurance providers, including TriWest Healthcare Alliance Corp. The company in 2018 was given sole control of the Department of Veterans Affairs primary community care programs. For the previous five years, TriWest had been jointly managing the VA’s two main outpatient care programs with Health Net Federal Services.

United Technologies Corporation was awarded over 150,000 government contracts since 2007 from departments such as the Department of Defense, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and State Department. In 2018, the company announced plans to split into three separate companies to better specialize in each specific business. Much of UTC’s government business is related to aerospace products, developed by subsidiary brand Pratt & Whitney. The company manufactures jet engines for fighter and transport aircraft for the U.S. and 28 other militaries around the world.