Thirteen questions about public money
American government publishes almost everything it does — every purchase order, every board agenda, every award. Almost nobody reads it, so a set of very ordinary questions turn out to have no commonly known answers.
Q1: A city hires one firefighter. Who gets paid?
You see a firefighter. The register sees eleven suppliers.
Nobody publishes what it costs to put one firefighter on a truck. Every component of it is published separately, by the cities that bought it.
Each bar is a real purchase order line, divided by the number of units it names. Per-firefighter figures are arithmetic on a published order; station figures are the order total. Bars share one linear scale.
There is no published figure for what it costs to equip one firefighter. There are hundreds of published figures for the parts, because every city buys them separately and writes down how many it bought.
Lima, Ohio bought TEN (10) JACKETS & TEN (10) PANTS for $38,560. That is $3,856 a firefighter for a coat and trousers. North Canton bought eight sets that also included Boots, Helmets, Gloves, Hoods for $44,900 — $5,613 each — so the head, hands and feet come to roughly $1,750. Lafayette, Indiana bought 31 sets at $3,480 each, which is what scale buys you: about ten per cent.
"3 FIRE FIGHTING TURNOUT GEAR"
Festus, Missouri — purchase order 48063, $15,467.89, 10 February 2026
Then the building. Ventura, California paid $34,746.91 to alert a single fire station, $28,853.93 for a second, and $33,583.76 for spare parts as its own line. Lima spent $166,612 on one diesel exhaust extraction system. Painesville pays $52,212.93 every quarter for dispatch and alerting maintenance — about $209,000 a year — and it is the tenth term of that arrangement.
Eleven suppliers appear across these orders, and one of them appears four times under four different names: Municipal Emergency Services trades as MES SERVICE COMPANY LLC, MES I ACQUISITION INC, MES SERVICE and MUNICIPAL EMERGENCY SERVICES INC. A vendor counting its own market share by supplier name would undercount itself by three quarters.
Q2: Nothing in government gets bought once. So when does it get re-bought?
Every system a city runs has a death date, and the city publishes it
Incumbency in government is near-total, which means the only moment a competitor exists is a renewal. Those dates sit in free-text fields on purchase orders.
Each dot is a purchase order that states its own term. Position is the order date; height is the amount on a log scale. The label on each is the day the incumbent becomes contestable.
Governments almost never buy something new. They re-buy what they already have, on a term they set years earlier — which means that for most of any given year, a competitor does not meaningfully exist. The exception is the renewal, and renewal dates are published in the least glamorous place imaginable: the description field of a purchase order.
Lima, Ohio pays Tyler Technologies for Year 5 SAAS (06/01/26-05/31/27). Two facts fall straight out of that string. The contract started on 1 June 2022, because year five ends in 2027. And it — along with four other Tyler orders at the same city — ends on 31 May 2027, making one renewal event rather than five. Lima's Harris utility-billing maintenance runs to 31 December 2026 instead, six months earlier and rising at 9.0% a year against Tyler's 3.0%.
"YEAR 1 (2026-2034) … AXON OFFICER SAFETY PACKAGES BOTH TASER 10 AND BWCS. SOLE SOURCE"
Omaha, Nebraska — purchase order 1318233, $175,882.46, 10 February 2026
Some of these doors are shut for a very long time. Omaha committed to Axon for eight years, sole source, through 2034, paid from asset-forfeiture money rather than the general fund. Christopher Newport University records a Sole Source for five years beginning 7/1/24 through 6/30/2029 — and notes in the same field that this is the second year of it.
And occasionally the opening is tiny and precisely dated. Currituck County, North Carolina wrote nine characters that describe an entire competitive strategy: HOMA Sole Source exp.6/30/26.
Q3: You see an unfilled job posting. Who gets the money instead?
A job a city cannot fill becomes somebody else’s contract, at a markup
The largest and fastest-growing thing state and local government buys from private companies is labour it could not hire — and agencies state the reason in their own budget documents.
Each bar is a contract or purchase order that exists because a public position went unfilled. Figures are total contract value where stated, otherwise the order amount. Log scale — these span three orders of magnitude.
There is no published figure for what it costs to equip one firefighter. There are hundreds of published figures for the parts, because every city buys them separately and writes down how many it bought.
Lima, Ohio bought TEN (10) JACKETS & TEN (10) PANTS for $38,560. That is $3,856 a firefighter for a coat and trousers. North Canton bought eight sets that also included Boots, Helmets, Gloves, Hoods for $44,900 — $5,613 each — so the head, hands and feet come to roughly $1,750. Lafayette, Indiana bought 31 sets at $3,480 each, which is what scale buys you: about ten per cent.
"3 FIRE FIGHTING TURNOUT GEAR"
Festus, Missouri — purchase order 48063, $15,467.89, 10 February 2026
Then the building. Ventura, California paid $34,746.91 to alert a single fire station, $28,853.93 for a second, and $33,583.76 for spare parts as its own line. Lima spent $166,612 on one diesel exhaust extraction system. Painesville pays $52,212.93 every quarter for dispatch and alerting maintenance — about $209,000 a year — and it is the tenth term of that arrangement.
Eleven suppliers appear across these orders, and one of them appears four times under four different names: Municipal Emergency Services trades as MES SERVICE COMPANY LLC, MES I ACQUISITION INC, MES SERVICE and MUNICIPAL EMERGENCY SERVICES INC. A vendor counting its own market share by supplier name would undercount itself by three quarters.
Q4: You can text your bank. Why can you often not text 911?
Virginia finished moving 911 off analogue circuits on 4 February 2026
Most American 911 was built on 1970s telephone technology that routes a call by the wire it arrived on. The replacement programme is happening right now, and the receipts say so.
Orange marks a state-level programme; green marks an agency buying the new system; blue marks the recurring cost of running it. Height is order value on a log scale.
The 911 system most Americans would reach today was designed in the 1970s. It runs over analogue telephone circuits and routes a call according to which physical wire it came in on, which is why it historically could not accept a text, a photograph or a video, could not carry location beyond the nearest tower, and often could not transfer a call across a county line. The replacement — an IP network called an ESInet, running to a standard called NENA i3 — is being built now, agency by agency.
You do not have to take that on trust, because the purchase orders narrate it. The Virginia Department of Emergency Management is still paying Verizon for the migration of existing 9-1-1 services to a new NG9-1-1 Service Provider, and a clerk added a parenthesis: (Transition actually completed on 2/4/2026.) The monthly charges came to $6,522,750.94 and the one-time switching cost to $792,672.94. An entire state crossed over in February of this year.
"FY 26/27 NG9-1-1 Independent Technical Evaluation"
California Governor's Office of Emergency Services → RAND Corporation, $2,000,000, 6 August 2026
California, meanwhile, is paying the RAND Corporation two million dollars in FY26/27 to independently evaluate its own NG911 programme — a fair indication of how settled the transition is not.
Underneath the state programmes, three different commercial models are visible at once. Franklin County, Missouri pays AT&T a flat $9,389.20 a month — MARCH ESINET, APRIL ESINET, MAY ESINET — roughly $112,700 a year for one county. Kansas bills its counties a State NG911 System Annual fee for a network the state runs. And a small city in Florida buys from INdigital, a regional carrier. The buyers include sheriffs, cities, counties, a state agency and a university.
Q5: Can one field in one purchase order tell you the day a competitor becomes vulnerable?
The most valuable string in public procurement is a date range in a description field
No procurement platform indexes free-text descriptions. That is where agencies put contract terms, year numbers, and expiry dates.
Every record here is selected for one reason: its description field contains a date the buyer did not have to publish. Height is order value on a log scale.
The commercially useful fact about a government contract is almost never its value. It is the date it ends, because that is the only moment at which a competitor exists. And that date is very rarely in a structured field. It is typed into a description box, by a clerk, in whatever format that clerk uses.
Currituck County, North Carolina produced the most efficient example in this entire collection: HOMA Sole Source exp.6/30/26. Nine characters after the brand name tell you that one manufacturer had an exclusive, and the exact day it stopped. Nothing else in the record says either thing.
"Sole Source for five years beginning 7/1/24 through 6/30/2029. This is 2nd year purchase order."
Christopher Newport University, Virginia — purchase order PO05419302
Others give up more than they need to. Christopher Newport University publishes the start, the end and its own position in the term. George Mason publishes a monthly recurring charge and a multiplier, so both the annual value and the renewal date fall out. Caltrans reveals an August-to-August licence year that no fiscal calendar would have predicted.
Sometimes there is no date at all and the field is still decisive. Henderson County's ANNUAL FEE YEAR 2 implies a first year and a third. And Painesville, Ohio reports a Quarterly Fee, 10th Term — which is not a contract term so much as a statement that this vendor has been there for a decade.
Q6: The bid was already decided. Can you read it in the spec?
Agencies explain, in writing, why only one company could have won
A sole-source justification is a public document in which a buyer sets out its reasoning. Read a few hundred and the mechanisms are always the same handful.
Each record is a purchase made without competition, grouped by the reason the buyer gave. Height is order value on a log scale.
Public bodies are generally required to compete their purchases, and generally required to explain in writing when they do not. Those explanations are public, and they are unguarded, because they are written to satisfy an internal auditor rather than a competitor.
There are only a few mechanisms, and they recur. The commonest is the previous purchase: Chatham County, Georgia bought an UPGRADE OF SIEMENS BUILDING AUTOMATION SOFTWARE FROM APOGEE TO DESIGO sole source, where the thing that excluded competitors was the Siemens system already in the building. Tantasqua Public Schools in Massachusetts recorded that the award was sole source AS ONLY RAD CAN PROVIDE THE SAME FILL — the specification was simply the incumbent's product.
"Sole source as only vendor in the region who would respond to a build quote"
Yucaipa, California — purchase order 20240474, $55,364.68, 28 March 2024
The second mechanism is proprietary designation, which can be as brief as Caltrans' three words: Sole Source Proprietary Software. The third is an outside party dictating the supplier — Miami University bought a Proprietary Chick-Fil-A (CFA) Millwork package… as required by CFA, a public institution's vendor chosen by a private franchisor.
And then there is Yucaipa, California, which wrote down something more interesting than exclusivity. Its justification was that this was the only vendor in the region who would respond to a build quote. The purchase was not locked. Nobody else bid. Those are very different market conditions, and only the document distinguishes them.
Q7: They didn’t lose on price. What does the scorecard say?
A cheaper bid lost by five points, and the scoresheet says which five
Where an agency publishes a scored bid tab, the losing criterion is visible. This is the thinnest of the ten questions: one full tab, and one buyer describing a near-tie.
Scored criteria from a single published four-vendor bid tabulation. Bars are points awarded out of the maximum for each criterion; the two rightmost entries are context rather than scores.
Suppliers assume they lose public bids on price. Where an agency publishes its scoring, that assumption is frequently wrong — and the scoresheet says so line by line.
Teton County School District in Idaho published a full four-vendor tabulation for a camera system. Verkada scored 93; Axis scored 98 and won. The technical criteria did not separate them. The whole five-point gap sat in two columns: Timeline and Cost. A vendor reading that document learns something it could act on — that its delivery schedule was as costly as its price — which no win/loss note reading "lost on price" would have told it.
"The differentiator in price was not even a penny. It was like maybe like a penny difference."
A 911 systems supplier, describing a statewide award
A supplier in emergency communications describes the same structure from the inside: there's only 4 of us who ever really bid on projects, in a market priced per resident per month, where the gap between winning and losing was about one cent.
This is the thinnest question of the ten and it is presented as an example rather than a finding. One published bid tab and one supplier account do not establish how often price is the deciding criterion. What they do establish is that when an agency scores a bid, the reason is written down — and that reason is not usually the one the loser assumes.
Q8: When someone is hired, what gets bought?
Some purchase orders name the hiring decision that caused them
A new person needs equipping, and the buyer often says so in the description field. That makes a personnel decision a dated, published purchasing signal.
Each record either names new hires as its reason, or is a personnel action recorded in minutes ahead of related spend. Height is order value on a log scale where amounts exist.
Hiring precedes buying, which makes a personnel decision the earliest signal an outsider can see. The difficulty is normally that hires and purchases live in unconnected records. Occasionally they do not, because the buyer explains itself.
Palm Beach Gardens, Florida issued a purchase order for $150,282.90 whose entire description is BUNKER GEAR FOR NEW HIRES. Ten weeks later it issued another for $125,235.75 with the same description, and then a third for STOCK BUNKER GEAR FOR EXPLORERS — gear bought ahead of an intake that had not happened yet. Three orders, roughly $309,000, and the stated cause of all of them is a hiring decision.
"BUNKER GEAR FOR NEW HIRES"
Palm Beach Gardens, Florida — purchase order 20556, $150,282.90, 13 October 2025
The reverse direction is visible in minutes. West Lafayette, Indiana asked its Board of Public Works to promote Nathan Besse from Construction Inspector to Engineering & Construction Manager — a move into the role that writes and approves construction specifications. Junction City, Oregon records a county split up the costs of the project manager position for wastewater, which is what a shared procurement looks like before it is one.
And Inyo County, California connects a federal statute directly to headcount: its HHS Director requested new position requests to support rising housing demands and higher Medi-Cal/CalFresh caseloads under HR1. A law passed in Washington becomes a job requisition in a county of eighteen thousand people. This is the least developed of the ten questions — proving that a hire on one date reliably predicts a purchase on another is real research, not a search — but where the buyer states the link, the link is stated.
Q9: Cities don’t decide. Do they cite?
Before a city decides, it finds out what its neighbours did — and then buys off their paperwork
Peer comparison is not informal in American local government. It is a documented step, sometimes performed by a regional body, and it ends in contracts one agency signs so that hundreds of others need not.
Blue marks an agency citing peers in its own reasoning. Green marks a purchase made on another agency’s competitively awarded contract — five different cooperative vehicles appear here.
American local governments are formally independent and behave nothing like it. Before a council sets a fee, adopts a policy or buys a system, it finds out what comparable places did — and this is not gossip, it is a documented step in the staff report.
Milford, Delaware states it plainly in a budget hearing: it has been recommended that other councils be surveyed for comparison purposes. Guilford County Schools measures itself in comparison to its national, statewide, and large city district peers. Three separate universities record the same sentence about being measured against national standards, peer and in-state comparisons, and credit rating agency medians — the comparison is itself a shared template.
Sometimes the survey is centralised. Rolling Meadows, Illinois has an agenda section headed Peer Comparisons that cites surveys performed by the Northwest Municipal Conference of nearby community permit fees. One regional body does the research, and dozens of member governments move on the same evidence.
"ACCESS TO THE FIRST DUE PLATFORM … OMNIA REGION 4 CONTRACT R240303 - SOLE SOURCE PROVIDER"
Lima, Ohio — purchase order 26-0651, $43,654.89, 20 July 2026
Then precedent stops being advisory and becomes an instrument. A cooperative contract is one agency's competitive award, made available for every other agency to buy on without running its own. Five different vehicles appear in these records: a city in Ohio buying software on a Texas regional award (OMNIA R240303), a Texas district on TIPS, a New Jersey district on the national NCPA, a Pennsylvania district on a PEPPM catalogue, and a California university police force putting $105.32 through a Sourcewell contract.
The consequence is asymmetric. Winning one agency does not just win that agency — it produces a citable precedent and, on a cooperative vehicle, a purchasing route into hundreds of others with no second solicitation. Lima even used a state transportation contract to buy cameras for a swimming pool.
Q10: A grant was awarded in March. What got bought in September?
Grant identifiers turn up inside the purchase orders they paid for
Federal awards and local purchase orders are kept in unconnected systems. Agencies join them anyway, by typing the award number into the fund line.
Orange marks a federal or state award; green marks the purchase it financed. The join is the award identifier, printed in the purchase order description.
Federal award records and local purchase-order registers are separate systems that do not reference each other. The join has to come from somewhere, and it usually comes from a municipal accountant typing an award identifier into a fund line because the auditor will want it.
FEMA awarded Lima, Ohio $170,909.09 under the Assistance to Firefighters Grant in September 2025. Nine months later Lima issued a $166,612 purchase order for a diesel exhaust extraction system whose description ends FUND 5615-EMW-2024-FS-00575. That string is the award number. The grant and the equipment are connected by a field the city was not required to publish.
The Safe Streets and Roads for All chain is tighter still. A $240,000 federal planning grant; then a $299,339 order to an engineering firm whose description cites both the programme and the authorising ordinance. At the programme's 80/20 cost share, $240,000 federal implies a $300,000 project — and the order lands $661 under that. A second consultant was engaged the same day for a single corridor, and its description mentions none of this.
"Flip the Switch at the Twin Lakes Floating Solar Project"
City of Lima, Ohio — agency video published 13 August 2026
The most complete loop runs through a congressional earmark. A Department of Energy award for a floating solar array obligated the city to run a public education outreach & stakeholder engagement campaign. Three years later the corpus contains that campaign, as a video. The grant's stated deliverable exists as a record.
Not every source is a grant. Omaha's eight-year Axon commitment is marked (EQUITABLE SHARING FUNDS-YR 1 ONLY) — funded from seized assets, and only for the first year of eight. Where years two to eight come from is a question the document raises and does not answer.
Q11: A storm passes. Who is still getting paid a year later?
A storm creates six separate industries, and the least obvious one is watching the trucks
Debris removal is the visible business. Debris monitoring — counting and photographing every load so a federal reimbursement will survive audit — is a second industry that only exists because of the first.
Read left to right: the event, what it caused, the vendor category each consequence created, and the purchase orders that actually paid. Lines trace which consequence leads to which category.
A storm is treated as a weather event and then a recovery cost. It is more useful to read it as an order-generating event, because the orders it generates are not one thing. They are six or seven separate industries, arriving in sequence, and only two of them are obvious.
The obvious one hauls debris. Bulloch County, Georgia paid Southern Disaster Recovery $549,081.65 for Helene Storm Debris Removal. On the same day it paid Thompson Consulting Services $795,434.79 for Helene Storm Debris Monitoring Services — a firm whose entire job is to watch the first firm work, count the loads and photograph them, because federal reimbursement will not survive an audit otherwise.
"DEBRIS REMOVAL PERIOD ENDING 02/27/2025 - MISSED TICKETS - HURRICANE HELENE"
Columbia County, Georgia — purchase order 2600663, $60,646.99, 1 August 2025
The county paid $246,353 more to document the work than to perform it. And Columbia County, Georgia shows what happens when the documentation fails: an invoice for MISSED TICKETS. In this industry the ticket, not the branch, is the deliverable.
Then the long tail. A marine services company clearing an inland creek in North Carolina. A $100,000 order to remove a bridge necessary to eliminate immediate of significant damage. A city clearing debris off private property after the Los Angeles wildfires. Tree crews billed by the hour against a 3,000-hour ceiling. And a Michigan order that simply says DR4880A — the federal declaration number, used as a cost code.
The timing is the part a supplier would care about. Manatee County paid for 2024 hurricane debris in August 2025. Bulloch County was still carrying balances forward eleven months on. Terrell, Texas paid for a monitoring week ending 7 September 2024 almost a year later. The storm is a news event for a week and a procurement event for two years.
Q12: A water main breaks at 3am. Why does nobody bid the work?
Nine contractors, $84.5 million, one day — bought before anything broke
You cannot run a competitive solicitation while a street is flooding. So utilities compete the work years early and award it to a standing panel, then call whoever answers.
Left to right: the event, what it forces, the vendor category that answers, and the orders. The largest node is not a repair at all — it is nine contracts awarded on a single day so that repairs never need bidding.
Nothing about an emergency repair looks like public procurement. There is no advertisement, no evaluation period, no award announcement. The work is done in hours by a contractor who was already under contract — and that prior contract is the interesting document.
On 23 December 2025 the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission in Maryland awarded nine separate contracts on the same day, every one of them reading 79577 Water and Sewer Main Replacement, Rehabilitation and Emergency Repair IDIQ. The values run from $5,000,000 to $17,289,475.90 and total $84,504,916.90. That is not a repair programme. It is a utility competing its emergencies years ahead of them and putting nine firms on a bench, so that when a main fails it can call whoever picks up.
"2026 On-Call Material Testing … for Sewer Maintenance Emergency Repair Projects"
Omaha, Nebraska — purchase order 1317029, $49,900, 14 January 2026
Below the panel, the break splits into trades that invoice separately. Someone opens the street. Someone else patches it — Greeley, Colorado batched six addresses onto one patching order. And a laboratory is retained on call to test backfill that has not been dug yet, because an untested patch fails inside a year.
The most revealing orders come from the buildings above. Chicopee Public Schools paid $71,008.10 for a water main break on East Main Street. Kutztown University paid for a BERKS 10 INCH WATER MAIN BREAK. And Montgomery College bought its emergency repair in accordance with the pricing, specifications, terms and conditions of MCPS Contract # 9746.2 — the local school district's contract. Even in an emergency, at speed, the college reached for somebody else's completed procurement.
Q13: What does government pay for one hour of one person?
Six people cost the same per head as two. The crew rate scales; the person does not.
A single Virginia transport contract prices identical work at three crew sizes. Dividing each rate by its headcount produces the same number — which tells you where the money actually goes.
Top three bars are the price per person per hour; bottom three are the price per crew per hour. Same contract, same task, one linear scale. The flatness of the top three is the finding.
Most public labour is bought as a bundle — a crew, a shift, a service — and the bundle hides the unit. Occasionally a contract quotes the same task at several bundle sizes, and then the unit falls out with one division.
Virginia's Department of Transportation holds a debris-removal contract with three line items for identical work: 2 MAN CREW at $140.00 an hour, 4 MAN CREW at $265.00, and 6 MAN CREW at $395.00, each against a 3,000-hour ceiling. Divide each by its headcount and the three numbers are $70.00, $66.25 and $65.83.
"6 MAN CREW - DEBRIS REMOVAL … QTY:3000 hour @395.00"
Virginia Department of Transportation — contract A501_0001288787, $1,185,000
Tripling the crew size buys a six per cent discount per head. There is effectively no volume discount on a person. What does scale is the equipment and supervision folded into the smallest crew — which is why the two-person crew is the most expensive per head, not the cheapest.
Two things follow. For a buyer, the cheap way to run this contract is the largest crew that the work can absorb, and the expensive habit is dispatching pairs. For a supplier, the quoted crew rate is the negotiation and the per-person rate is the truth — and both are published.
This is one contract in one state, and the per-person figure is arithmetic on published rates rather than a rate the buyer disclosed. What makes it worth showing is how rarely the division is done at all: three numbers in one purchase order contain the entire unit economics of disaster labour, and they were sitting in a description field.