About OTA Watch

Federal Other Transaction (OT) awards newly public in FPDS, all listed each week, with the most remarkable few picked out and summarized by Claude.

What an OT is. Other Transactions are agreements made outside the Federal Acquisition Regulation, mostly by the Defense Department for prototypes and their follow-on production. They are reported to FPDS, the federal procurement database, but not to USAspending.

What each week has. Every OT record that first appeared in FPDS since the previous week: new agreements, orders and vehicles, and modifications. Each record is one action, and its dollar amount is what that action obligated. Claude reads them all and picks out a few (at most five, sometimes none).

The 90-day delay. Defense records become public in FPDS about 90 days after they are signed, and some are entered months later still, so most of each week's records were signed about three months before. Other agencies' records appear within days.

Chosen and written up by Claude. The headlines and explanations are Claude's. The fact lines, amounts and totals come straight from the FPDS records, a pick's quote must appear in its record's description, and a pick whose dollar figures don't match its records is dropped. AI can still misread a record: check the FPDS record (each one links to FPDS's public feed, which shows it as XML) before relying on anything.

Spotted a wrong pick, quote or figure, or have a suggestion? Open an issue on GitHub.

Code, data (every OT record collected, data/documents.csv) and rules: github.com/abigailhaddad/ota-watch. RSS: feed.xml. No JavaScript, no cookies, no trackers.