Granted Research
How concentrated is federal grant money?
Data: FY2024 federal grant obligations by recipient (federal awards). Last verified July 2026.
In fiscal year 2024 the federal government paid out $1.26T in grants and cooperative agreements. It did not spread that money evenly. Of the 54,950 organizations that received a positive grant obligation in FY2024, the top 100 captured 70% of every dollar — and the ten largest captured nearly a third between them, according to Granted’s federal awards database. But the explanation is not a story of a few winners beating everyone else: all ten of the largest recipients are state health agencies that pass federal Medicaid dollars through to hospitals, clinics, and low-income residents.
70%
Captured by the top 100
0.18% of 54,950 recipients
32%
Captured by the top 10
all state Medicaid agencies
0.98
Gini coefficient
1.0 = total concentration
0.24%
Went to the bottom half
27,475 recipients
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<iframe src="https://grantedai.com/research/federal-grant-concentration/embed" width="100%" height="520" style="border:1px solid #e5e7eb;border-radius:12px" title="How concentrated is federal grant money? FY2024 — Granted AI" loading="lazy"></iframe>The concentration, in plain numbers
Cumulative share of the $1.26T in positive FY2024 grant obligations captured by the largest recipients.
| Recipients | Grant dollars | Share of all grants | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Top 1 | largest recipient | $113.4B | 9.0% |
| Top 10 | all state Medicaid agencies | $403.3B | 32.0% |
| Top 100 | 0.18% of recipients | $882.2B | 70.0% |
| Top 1,000 | 1.8% of recipients | $1.14T | 90.7% |
| Top 1% | 550 recipients | $1.10T | 87.0% |
| Bottom 50% | 27,475 recipients | $3.0B | 0.24% |
Gini coefficient of the recipient distribution: 0.98 (0 = every recipient gets an equal amount; 1 = one recipient gets everything). Positive obligations only — see methodology.
The ten largest recipients
Every one is a state Medicaid or health-and-human-services agency. The last column shows how much of each agency’s money is formula/block grants — the statutory, non-competitive funding (mostly Medicaid) that these agencies redistribute rather than keep.
| # | Recipient | State | FY24 grants | Share | Formula |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | California Department of Health Care Services | CA | $113.4B | 9.0% | 100% |
| 2 | New York State Department of Health | NY | $76.6B | 6.1% | 87% |
| 3 | Texas Health and Human Services Commission | TX | $38.6B | 3.1% | 100% |
| 4 | Pennsylvania Department of Human Services | PA | $32.2B | 2.6% | 100% |
| 5 | Ohio Department of Medicaid | OH | $27.4B | 2.2% | 100% |
| 6 | North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services | NC | $26.5B | 2.1% | 99% |
| 7 | Florida Agency for Health Care Administration | FL | $24.7B | 2.0% | 100% |
| 8 | Michigan Department of Health and Human Services | MI | $23.2B | 1.8% | 99% |
| 9 | Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services | IL | $21.5B | 1.7% | 100% |
| 10 | Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System | AZ | $19.3B | 1.5% | 100% |
Across the top 10, 97% of the combined $403.3B is formula and block grants — chiefly the federal share of Medicaid, which flows to a state agency before reaching providers and patients.
What the numbers show
The single largest recipient of federal grant money in the country is California’s Department of Health Care Services, which took in $113.4B — 9.0% of all federal grant dollars, nationwide, on its own. It is not an outlier so much as the clearest example of the pattern: Medicaid is a formula grant, so Washington sends each state’s federal share to a single state agency, which then pays hospitals, clinics, and managed-care plans. The dollars are enormous, but the agency is a conduit, not the destination.
This is why federal grant funding looks so concentrated. A handful of very large statutory programs — Medicaid above all, then other formula grants for public health, education, and transportation — move hundreds of billions of dollars through a small number of state agencies. Concentration here is a feature of how Congress structured assistance, not evidence that a few organizations out-competed everyone else. Read the top of this list as a map of where federal money enters the states, not a leaderboard of grant winners.
For organizations that actually write proposals, the more relevant pool is competitive funding — project grants and cooperative agreements, awarded on merit rather than by formula. That pool is $295.8B spread across 47,165 recipients, and it is markedly less concentrated: the largest recipient holds 3.4% rather than 9.0%, the top 100 hold 39% rather than 70%, and the Gini coefficient falls from 0.98 to 0.92. It is still top-heavy — large research universities and hospital systems dominate — but no single entity swallows a tenth of it.
So the headline is true and misleading at the same time. A few recipients really do capture most federal grant money — but most of that money is pre-allocated to states by formula and never passes through a competitive process at all. The pool an organization can realistically compete for is both smaller and more open than the $1.26T top line suggests. This analysis counts grant-type federal assistance only — no loans, contracts, or direct payments — for fiscal year 2024, and measures concentration over positive obligations. The full methodology, the pass-through caveat, and the reconciliation to the $1.19T net total are below.
Methodology & sources
- Data source
- Federal financial-assistance awards from USAspending.gov, as mirrored in Granted’s federal awards database (687,607 FY2024 award actions). Every FY2024 row is grant-type assistance — block grants, formula grants, project grants, and cooperative agreements. No loans, direct payments, or procurement contracts are included.
- Concentration universe (positive obligations)
- We rank recipients by the sum of their
federal_action_obligationfor fiscal year 2024, counting only positive obligations (440,264 of 687,607 rows). Net deobligations (99,529 negative rows) and zero-dollar actions are excluded from the concentration measure, because negative per-recipient tails would break a cumulative-share curve and a Gini coefficient. The positive-only total is $1.26T. - Recipient identity
- Recipients are grouped by their SAM.gov Unique Entity ID (UEI) where present — populated for 97.7% of FY2024 rows — and by an uppercased, trimmed recipient name otherwise. Grouping by name alone yields a nearly identical count (53,056 vs 54,950), so the result is not an artifact of the identity method. Multi-campus systems appear as separate recipients when they hold separate UEIs.
- Pass-through caveat
- The largest recipients are state Medicaid and human-services agencies. They do not keep this money: federal Medicaid dollars are formula grants routed to a state agency, which redistributes them to providers and beneficiaries. High concentration reflects how federal assistance is structured — a few large statutory programs channeled through states — not private capture. We report the competitive pool (project grants + cooperative agreements, types 04+05) separately for this reason.
- Gini coefficient
- Computed over the full distribution of 54,950 per-recipient positive totals, where 0 is perfect equality (every recipient receives the same amount) and 1 is maximum concentration (one recipient receives everything). All FY2024 grants: 0.98; competitive pool only: 0.92.
- Reconciliation
- Our companion study on grants per capita by state reported a FY2024 net grand total of $1.19T across all recipients. The positive-only total used here is $1.26T; the $69.2B difference is the downward adjustments (net deobligations) and zero-dollar action rows that the net figure absorbs.
- Reproducibility
- Every number on this page is generated by a committed analysis script (
scripts/research-studies/federal-grant-concentration/analyze.py). The downloadable CSV lists the top 1,000 recipients with their rank, dollars, and cumulative share. See our data methodology for how Granted sources and maintains this data.
Free to cite and republish with attribution to Granted AI (grantedai.com/research/federal-grant-concentration) under CC BY 4.0. Questions or corrections: nathan@grantedai.com.