i pointed Claude Code at the pentagon's public budget document and told it to find every contract overpaying by 10x or more
it came back with 340 results worth $4.2B in potential undercuts
and a business plan i didn't ask for
i fed it the
FPDS.gov procurement feed and said "cross-reference with commercial COTS pricing"
it pulled 1.2 million contract awards through the USAspending v2 API and started comparing line items against retail equivalents
→ $1,280 for a connector plug that costs $14.80 on digikey
→ $3,400 for a circuit breaker listed at $287 on mouser
→ $71,000 for a ruggedized tablet that's basically a panasonic toughbook with a sticker
→ $940 per unit for cable assemblies you can get from shenzhen for $31
→ 340 contracts flagged at 10x or more markup
→ 19 of them were above 50x
it used XGBoost scoring against 43,000 vendor profiles from
SAM.gov to rank by ease of undercut
then unprompted it generated a full proposal template compliant with CMMC 2.0 requirements
87 of those contracts have a single domestic supplier, zero competition. the AI calculated that undercutting by just 40% would still leave 6x margins on most items
it formatted everything into a pitch deck, named the company, and suggested i register on
SAM.gov tonight
i didn't ask for any of that
the pentagon spends billions a year trying to audit problems like this. a poet with Claude Code and a public API flagged $4.2 billion in one afternoon
the agent is currently drafting my first bid response