Most federal IT trend stories are written from the top down: aggregate cloud spend is up X percent, here’s a chart, here’s a quote from a Gartner analyst.
The problem with top-down stories is that they don’t tell a sales team where to focus. “Federal cloud spending is rising” is true and useless.
So we ran a different analysis. We took every IT transaction at one cabinet department — USDA — for the past seven fiscal years, classified the technology vendor on each line, and tracked the trajectory.
What we found is more specific, and more actionable, than any aggregate number we’ve seen published.
The headline finding
Cloud infrastructure spending at USDA has grown 23× since FY2022. AWS alone went from $300K in FY2022 to $20M in FY2025.
That’s not a slow drift toward modernization. That’s a department restructuring how it buys IT.
Five vendor trajectories worth knowing
| Vendor | FY2020 | FY2025 | Change | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AWS + Azure | ~$3M (FY22) | $71M | 23× | USDA’s cloud migration is real and accelerating |
| ServiceNow | $20M | $40M | +100% | Fastest-growing enterprise SaaS at USDA |
| Salesforce | $112M | ~$60M | −46% | Peaked in FY20, softening as USDA consolidates CRM |
| Cisco networking | $37.5M | $17.6M | −53% | On-prem networking shrinking with cloud migration |
| Cybersecurity (Splunk + Tanium + Carbon Black + Tenable) | ~$55M | ~$55M | flat | Renewal businesses, hard to displace, hard to grow |
Each of these has a story underneath it. A few are worth pulling out.
ServiceNow is winning. Salesforce is losing.
ServiceNow doubled from $20M to $40M between FY2021 and FY2025, and the trend is still climbing. Salesforce peaked at $112M in FY2020 and has softened to roughly $60M.
If you sell against ServiceNow, USDA is no longer a stable account. It’s an account where your competitor is winning quarterly.
Cisco’s federal account team should be worried
Cisco networking spend at USDA dropped 53% in five years. The reason isn’t mysterious: USDA is moving infrastructure to the cloud, and on-prem networking shrinks with it.
The same trend will hit Cisco at every department running an aggressive cloud migration. Renewal numbers are not the right metric. Cloud expansion rate is.
Cybersecurity is the steady state
Splunk, Tanium, Carbon Black, and Tenable together hold approximately $55M annually at USDA — and that figure has barely moved across five fiscal years.
SIEM and endpoint tools are renewal businesses now:
- Hard to displace
- Hard to grow
- Locked in by data ingestion relationships
If your competitive strategy is “displace Splunk at USDA,” the math says you’ll spend two years doing it.
Two new signals nobody is tracking
Palantir appeared at USDA in FY2022 with zero prior spend. It’s now at a $6.6M annual run-rate, with $2.6M already booked in FY2026. Data analytics is becoming a distinct procurement category at USDA — and Palantir is the early mover.
If you sell competing analytics platforms, that’s a window that’s closing.
Cohesity → Commvault. Cohesity went from $4.7M at USDA in FY2024 to $100K in FY2025 — effectively zeroed out. Commvault simultaneously surged from $145K in FY2023 to $5.4M in FY2025.
A major data protection platform shift is underway. Channel partners who recognized it early are positioned to ride it. The ones who didn’t are about to face renewal conversations they won’t enjoy.
Why this isn’t visible in USAspending
None of this is visible in USAspending.gov as it presents the data.
The raw transactions are public. But the categorization — what’s cloud, what’s networking, what’s a SaaS platform versus an ERP system — has to be inferred from contract descriptions, NAICS codes, and vendor relationships.
You can’t query “show me cloud growth at USDA” on USAspending. You can only get there by classifying every transaction yourself, which is most of the work.
That’s the part of federal IT analysis that’s been missing for sales teams:
- Aggregate market reports are too high-level
- Raw transaction databases are too low-level
- The middle layer — agency-level vendor classification with multi-year trajectories — is where the actionable competitive signal lives
What’s next
We built FedSpend to live in that middle layer. The USDA findings above are pulled directly from the platform.
We’ll be publishing more of these breakdowns regularly. Commerce, SSA, and DoD components are next.
If you’re selling federal IT, the most useful question this quarter is not “what’s our pipeline at USDA?” It’s “what’s actually moving at USDA, and are we positioned for it?“
The answer is rarely the one your account team expects.
