"Federal Government Segment gross margin was down 60 basis points, primarily due to the loss of certain higher margin contracts as a result of initiatives associated with the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency 'DOGE'."

That sentence appeared on page three of ASGN Incorporated's fourth-quarter earnings release, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on February 4. In the bloodless dialect of corporate disclosure — where officers face personal legal liability for misstatements, where outside counsel marks up every clause — it was the equivalent of someone standing up in a crowded room and pointing a finger.

ASGN is a staffing and IT services firm based in Glen Allen, Virginia. Its federal division had lost $10.8 million in revenue for the quarter, a 3.7 percent dip that in most years wouldn't draw a follow-up question on the earnings call. What made the filing extraordinary wasn't the size of the loss. It was the willingness to name its cause. Every other federal contractor that reported results this winter described revenue pressure in the passive voice — procurement delays, market conditions, reduced agency outlays. ASGN typed "DOGE" into a document filed with the SEC and attached a price tag: roughly $1.7 million in gross profit, derived from 60 basis points of margin compression on $281.5 million in quarterly revenue.

It was the smallest financial hit among the companies Plaintext examined. It was the only one with a name on it.

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That $10.8 million turned out to be a footnote in a much larger story. A Plaintext review of SEC filings from January and February 2026 found that five major government contractors — Booz Allen Hamilton, Amentum, Science Applications International Corporation, DLH Holdings, and ASGN — collectively lost more than $600 million in year-over-year U.S. federal revenue during the fall quarter and surrounding months. At least $344 million of that total comes from quarter-specific declines at four companies; the figure exceeds $600 million when you add Booz Allen's nine-month civil-segment deterioration, which the company does not break into individual quarters. (The full methodology and filing references are in the evidence appendix.) The losses coincide with the longest government shutdown in American history, an administration-wide push to cut agency spending, and a wave of lost contract competitions. They landed almost entirely on contractors serving civilian agencies — Treasury, Health and Human Services, the VA — while defense and intelligence work held steady or grew. To our knowledge, no major outlet has tied the sole on-the-record DOGE attribution to this cross-company revenue picture.

Taken together, the filings suggest something broader than a bad quarter — a growing split between the defense and civilian halves of the federal contracting economy.

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Forty-Three Days

To understand the numbers, start on October 1, 2025, the day the federal government shut down.

Congress had failed to pass a continuing resolution. Agencies furloughed hundreds of thousands of workers. Contracting officers — the government employees who approve invoices, issue modifications, and award new work — went home. For companies that sell services to Washington, the consequences were immediate: stop-work orders on non-essential contracts, frozen payments, a complete halt to new solicitations. The procurement pipeline went dark.

The shutdown lasted 43 days, ending November 12. It broke the record set by the 35-day closure that stretched from December 2018 into January 2019. The timing was punishing for contractors whose fiscal quarters run October through December: the shutdown consumed nearly half the first quarter of the federal fiscal year, the period when agencies begin spending new appropriations.

Industry analysts and the Professional Services Council estimated that recovery from a shutdown of this length would take three to five months. Agencies needed to re-onboard furloughed staff, restart procurement processes, and clear weeks of backlogged actions. For contractors whose quarters ended before that recovery could take hold, the revenue damage was already locked in.

The filings that arrived in January and February show how unevenly that damage landed — and how much of it extended beyond the shutdown itself.

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Vitamins, Not Calories

On February 11, Science Applications International Corporation — known universally in Washington as SAIC — filed an 8-K containing preliminary fourth-quarter results and a revised forward outlook. By the unsentimental standards of earnings releases, it was a rough document.

SAIC reported preliminary revenue of approximately $1.745 billion, with organic growth of roughly negative six percent year-over-year. At that rate of decline, the quarterly shortfall amounts to an estimated $111 million. (The prior-year quarterly base isn't disclosed in this filing; Plaintext derived the estimate from the stated organic growth rate. Final audited results are due March 16, and the figure could shift.)

Then came the guidance cut. SAIC slashed its fiscal 2027 revenue outlook to $7.0 billion to $7.2 billion, down from $7.35 billion to $7.55 billion. At the midpoint, a $350 million reduction. An investor presentation filed alongside the 8-K laid out the math in a waterfall: subtract $200 million for the loss of the Army RITS contract, subtract $75 million for the loss of Air Force Cloud One, subtract another $75 million for general "market conditions."

Army RITS — Responsive IT Services — was a large enterprise IT support contract that SAIC had held for years. The Army awarded it instead to Accenture Federal Services. SAIC protested to the Government Accountability Office; a decision is expected by May 20, according to Washington Technology. Air Force Cloud One Next went to Leidos. SAIC initially challenged that award in the Court of Federal Claims but withdrew its protest on January 30, according to Bloomberg Law.

Combined, the two losses represent $275 million in annual revenue from large, commoditized IT programs that SAIC had long counted as recurring work. SAIC employs roughly 24,000 people. The company has not publicly disclosed how many of those employees supported RITS and Cloud One, or how many positions are at risk. The filing describes efforts to "redeploy" the affected workforce, but provides no headcount or timeline.

The clearest window into SAIC's thinking came not from the filing itself but from an interview its chief financial officer, Prabu Natarajan, gave Washington Technology the same day. He was unusually direct. "If I zoom out," Natarajan said, "the one common thread across most of [our recompete losses] has been large EIT" — enterprise information technology. Then he offered a metaphor that doubled as a strategy shift: "Let's focus on vitamins and not calories."

Vitamins, not calories. It was a vivid way to describe a company choosing to be smaller — pivoting away from high-revenue, low-margin IT operations toward specialized, higher-value work. It was also an acknowledgment that the lost contracts are not coming back, and that SAIC's revenue base next year will look fundamentally different from this year's.

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The Civilian Divide

For sheer scale, consider Amentum alongside SAIC. Amentum Holdings, a Chantilly, Virginia-based contractor with roughly 47,000 employees, began filing SEC reports following a corporate combination that brought it to public markets in 2024. For the three months ending January 2, 2026, it reported U.S. government revenue of $3.08 billion — down $200 million from $3.28 billion a year earlier. That is the largest raw-dollar decline in the group.

But the company's revenue disaggregation reveals a now-familiar pattern. Amentum splits its U.S. government work into two buckets: "DoD & IC" (defense and intelligence) and "Other U.S. Government," its label for non-defense, non-intelligence federal agencies. Defense and intelligence revenue dipped $92 million, or 3.5 percent. The civilian category fell $108 million — 16 percent.

The same asymmetry showed up at Booz Allen Hamilton, the 110-year-old consulting firm headquartered in McLean, Virginia. When Booz Allen filed its quarterly report on January 23, the headline number was a manageable disappointment: total revenue for the nine months ending December 31 came in at $8.43 billion, down $571 million from the prior-year period. Its civil-agency segment — work for agencies like Treasury, HHS, and the EPA — told a starker story. Civil revenue fell to $810 million for the nine months, down from $1.09 billion a year earlier. A decline of $280 million, or nearly 26 percent.

An important caveat: this figure covers nine months, not a single quarter. The filing does not isolate how much of the $280 million drop fell in the October-through-December period versus the preceding six months. Booz Allen does not attribute the decline to any specific cause. What is visible is the magnitude: more than a quarter of the civil segment's revenue base eroded in under a year, even as defense and intelligence work — which together account for more than 70 percent of Booz Allen's revenue, according to its segment reporting — held up far better.

The workforce shrank in parallel. Booz Allen's headcount stood at approximately 31,600 as of December 31, down roughly 12 percent from a year earlier — a reduction of about 4,400 positions, according to Washington Technology, citing company disclosures. How those reductions happened — layoffs, attrition, hiring freezes, or some combination — is not specified in the filing or the company's public statements. No WARN Act mass-layoff notices for Booz Allen appeared in public records for major operating areas during the period.

Then came a separate blow, after the quarter closed. On January 27, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the department was canceling its contracts with Booz Allen. Sherwood News reported that the action covered 31 contracts worth a combined $21 million. Treasury press release sb0371 cited a 2020 data breach involving taxpayer information as the basis for the action. (Plaintext was unable to independently verify every detail of the cancellation from primary documents; Booz Allen did not respond to a request for comment, and Treasury did not respond to a request for additional detail.) The $21 million is not reflected in the $280 million figure, which covers the period through December 31. It is an additional forward risk layered on top of an already deteriorating segment.

The contrast with defense-oriented competitors throws the civilian decline into sharp relief. CACI International, which filed its quarterly report on January 22, posted six-month revenue of $4.51 billion — up $351 million, or 8.4 percent. CACI's portfolio is roughly 85 percent Department of Defense and intelligence community work, with civilian agencies accounting for about 12 percent of the mix, according to its 10-Q. The company grew while Booz Allen's civil segment contracted by a quarter.

Maximus, also based in McLean, offered another instructive comparison. Its U.S. Federal Services segment grew 0.8 percent, to $787 million from $781 million, despite the fact that Maximus primarily supports civilian health agencies. In its February 5 earnings release, the company indicated that its core programs — Medicaid, Medicare, and Affordable Care Act marketplace operations — carried statutory mandates and dedicated funding streams that continued through the shutdown. The same federal spending freeze that starved Booz Allen's civil clients largely passed over the health entitlements that Maximus administers.

The pattern across these filings is consistent: civilian agencies where spending is discretionary — where contract renewals depend on annual appropriations and the judgment of political appointees — became dramatically less reliable revenue sources in the fall of 2025. Civilian agencies that administer entitlement programs mostly kept writing checks. Industry analysts who track this market describe the defense-versus-civilian split as increasingly stark.

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When There's No Cushion

The decline that best illustrates the vulnerability of smaller federal contractors belongs to DLH Holdings, an Atlanta-based company with about 2,000 employees and a client list that reads like a directory of civilian health agencies.

DLH's customer concentration, disclosed in its February 9 quarterly filing, leaves no room for rebalancing. Health and Human Services: 46 percent of revenue. The Department of Veterans Affairs: 17 percent. The Department of Defense: 16 percent. There are no commercial clients. DLH is, by design, a pure-play federal health services contractor — and in a quarter defined by civilian agency disruption, that design became a liability.

For the three months ending December 31, DLH reported revenue of $68.9 million, down from $90.8 million in the year-ago period. A decline of $21.9 million, or 24 percent — the steepest percentage drop among all the contractors Plaintext examined.

The filing contained a second disclosure that signals deeper trouble. DLH noted it was evaluating whether the revenue decline constituted an "impairment trigger" — the accounting term for a moment when a company must assess whether its assets are still worth what the balance sheet says they are. DLH also reduced its adjusted EBITDA guidance for the fiscal year. For a firm with no commercial revenue to absorb the shock, a quarter like this raises questions about the trajectory of the business itself, not just the quarter.

The ripple effects extend beyond companies large enough to file with the SEC. Federal prime contractors rely on networks of subcontractors, many of them small businesses operating on single-digit margins. A Forbes analysis from October 2025 profiled small government contractors during the shutdown and described owners drawing on personal credit lines to make payroll — and that was before the scale of the prime-contractor declines became public. A revenue decline of this magnitude at the prime level translates into reduced subcontract awards, slower payments, and cash-flow pressure for firms that lack the balance sheets to absorb months of disruption.

Booz Allen, Amentum, SAIC, DLH, and ASGN either did not respond or declined to comment when Plaintext requested interviews for this article. The Professional Services Council, the trade association representing federal contractors, also did not respond.

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Three Disruptions, Tangled Together

The filings do not cleanly separate what caused these declines, and neither can we.

The 43-day shutdown is the most obvious culprit and the one that hit every contractor with a fall-quarter reporting period. Payment freezes, furloughed contracting officers, and halted solicitations created an immediate revenue gap. Industry consultants estimated three to five months of recovery time, meaning the effects extended well into early 2026.

DOGE's role is harder to quantify. ASGN is the only company among the six examined to cite the Department of Government Efficiency by name in an SEC filing. The others may have experienced similar pressure but chose not to attribute it explicitly — or may not have been able to isolate the effect. Reporting by the Chronicle-Journal and other outlets described DOGE conducting contract reviews across civilian agencies, canceling contracts and reducing staff at agencies including the CFPB and EPA. But Plaintext identified no other contractor in this group that put a specific DOGE impact on paper.

SAIC's recompete losses — $275 million in annual revenue from Army RITS and Air Force Cloud One — are the most precisely quantified cause, but also the most company-specific. These were large enterprise IT programs facing intense price competition, the kind of work where incumbents fight on cost and face constant pressure from lower bidders. Whether those losses reflect a broader market shift or SAIC-specific execution is a matter of interpretation; Natarajan's comments in Washington Technology suggest the company views them as structural, not idiosyncratic.

The honest answer is that these causes compound one another. A shutdown delays procurement, which forces agencies to extend existing contracts rather than award new ones, which creates a backlog that an efficiency mandate to reduce spending then deepens. A company that loses a recompete during a shutdown faces a double hit: the lost contract and the frozen pipeline that might have replaced it. The $600-million-plus in combined declines is documented in SEC filings, but no single filing — and no outside analysis — can cleanly allocate it among a record shutdown, an unprecedented efficiency campaign, specific contract losses, and the accumulated friction of a procurement system under simultaneous stress from all three.

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What the Numbers Don't Show

These filings document what already happened. The more unsettling signal is forward-looking.

SAIC's guidance cut is the clearest marker. When a company reduces its revenue outlook by $150 million to $350 million for the coming year, it is not describing a quarter's disruption. It is describing a changed operating environment. The $75 million allocated to "market conditions" in SAIC's waterfall is doing considerable analytical work — it encompasses procurement delays, budget uncertainty, and whatever cumulative effect the efficiency push has had on agencies' willingness to issue new work.

DLH's impairment evaluation is another pending signal. If the company determines that its revenue decline reflects a permanent reset in HHS and VA contract volumes rather than a temporary shutdown disruption, it could be forced to write down assets — a step that typically precedes deeper restructuring.

If industry consultants are right that shutdowns create three to five months of procurement backlog, then the agencies that went dark on October 1 may not return to normal contracting tempo until February or March 2026. The contractors whose quarters end in March will be the next test of whether this is a one-quarter shock or a longer reordering.

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On March 16, SAIC will file its final fourth-quarter results, replacing the preliminary numbers with audited figures. Booz Allen's next quarterly filing will show whether the civil-segment decline has stabilized or accelerated. DLH will disclose whether it concluded that an impairment trigger exists. And across the office parks of Northern Virginia — in Reston, McLean, Chantilly — program managers, systems engineers, and help-desk technicians who serve civilian agencies will learn whether their agencies have money to spend again, or whether the combination of a record shutdown and an efficiency campaign has permanently altered the math of working for the federal government.

When those filings arrive, we'll learn whether "DOGE" becomes a term more CFOs are willing to say on the record — or whether ASGN remains the only company that dared put the name in writing.