30 Companies With the Largest COVID-19 Government Contracts

San Diego-based Ajinomoto Althea, Inc. is one of several biotech companies to rank on this list. On May 4, 2020, the company was awarded a $200 million dollar contract with the Federal Emergency Management, or FEMA, a subdivision of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The contract, which is set to expire on Oct. 1, is for medical supplies, equipment, and services related to the COVID-19 pandemic response.

Gemini Bio is a California-based biotech company that manufactures and distributes cell culture media for different research, including cell and gene therapy research, to academic research and across the pharmaceutical industry. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the company has been assisting its customers in four primary areas: cell culture, viral harvesting and transport, research tools, and instruments for analysis. The company was awarded during the pandemic a contract with the DHS that could be worth as much as $200 million.

Hardwood Products Company is a division of Puritan Medical Products, one of the country’s leading manufacturers of specialty medical equipment including tongue depressors and tipped applicators. During the pandemic, the company was awarded contracts with the DHS and the Department of Health and Human Services that, combined, could be worth as much as $204.1 million. The contracts include $75 million from the Defense Production Act to ramp up production of the company’s foam-tip swabs from 40 million per month to 60 million.

Becton Dickinson and Company is a New Jersey-based medical instrument manufacturer with an annual revenue of about $17.3 billion. According to the company, its products play a role in care delivery for nine out of every 10 American hospital patients. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the company has been supplying customers with sample collection products such as swabs, and is also launching molecular COVID-19 tests that can be conducted in a hospital, rather than an external lab.

The company’s contracts with the federal government total $217 million in value. Some of it is through the U.S. Food and Drug Administration — which is part of the HHS — for its COVID-19 diagnostic tests.

The San Mar Corporation is an apparel and accessory distribution company that manufactures t-shirts, hats, bags — and now washable and reusable face masks. On May 8, 2020, the company was awarded a $217 million contract with the HHS to supply face cloth coverings.

Longhorn Vaccines and Diagnostics is a verteran-owned company that develops products for molecular testing. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the company’s PrimeStore Molecular Transport Medium, which was invented in 2006, has proven invaluable as it can rapidly inactivate the virus and allow molecular testing outside containment facilities, increasing therefore the number of testing laboratories. The company was awarded a contract with the DHS that could be worth as much as $225.8 million.

Thomas Scientific LLC is a medical supply company based in New Jersey. The COVID-19-related contracts the company currently has with the federal government could be worth over $231 million. The vast majority of that value is through contracts with the DHS, though the company also has a contract valued at over $5 million with the HHS. These contracts are for a range of supplies related to the COVID-19 pandemic, including 450,000 swabs and millions of viral transport media, or VTM, units.

South Carolina-based chemical, textile, health care goods manufacturing company Milliken could receive as much as a quarter billion dollars from the DHS during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the outbreak began, the company has ramped up production of antibacterial cleaning supplies, personal protective equipment, and antimicrobial fabric. The company’s federal contracts include one for and medical gowns for use by government agencies.

MSA Safety Sales is a $1.4 billion safety product manufacturing company based in Pennsylvania. The company’s contracts with the federal government are largely through the DHS agency FEMA for personal protective equipment. So far, MSA Safety has made $1 million from its government contracts, but under the terms negotiated, it could make as much as $251 million.

Through the Small Business Administration, the federal government has paid Highlight Technologies nearly $39 million so far during the COVID-19 pandemic. Highlight Technologies is a business management and consulting firm that the SBA is using for loan processing assistance, as, so far, the government has provided nearly $2 trillion in financial assistance to U.S. businesses.

Per the terms of the contract, the SBA could spend a total of nearly $270 million for the services of Highlight Technologies.

Brillient Corporation is a minority-owned consulting company based in Virginia. During the pandemic, the company has been paid $10.4 million from the Small Business Administration for providing administrative support services. Since April, the SBA has distributed over $600 billion to U.S. businesses. The most Brillient Corporation could receive from the SBA under the current contract is $274.7 million.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Cincinnati-based manufacturer Standard Textile Co. Inc. has won a number of government PPE contracts worth a collective $292.0 million. The bulk of the contract value comes from an indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract for reusable gowns for health care workers. According to a press release from the company, to meet demand, Standard Textile has repurposed its plant in Brownsville, Texas, which is normally used to make decorative hotel linens, to manufacture face masks. Other facilities have been retooled to develop cover gowns. As of June 8, Standard Textile Co. Inc. has met $42.0 million of its contract obligations.

Zoll Medical Corporation, a Massachusetts-based company that markets and develops medical devices and software, has multiple contracts related to the COVID-19 outbreak with several agencies that fall under the purview of the HHS and the Department of Veterans Affairs. The company has so far been paid nearly all of the contract value. The vast majority of the federal money the company has received — $350 million — has come from the HHS for ventilators.

Since March 25, American Medical Response has inked several contracts with the DHS — many of which were through FEMA, a DHS agency. If all contacts are exercised to their full potential, the company stands to receive nearly $389 million from the federal government. So far, the company has received $196.9 million, or about half of the contracts’ maximum value.

American Medical Response Inc. is a Colorado-based medical transportation services company. The bulk of federal money the company was paid was for emergency management support services in New York and New Jersey, two of the states hardest hit by the virus.

Based in Cambridge, United Kingdom, AstraZeneca is one of only a handful of non-American companies to rank on this list. The company was paid $413.2 million from the HHS to develop and manufacture a vaccine for the virus. The company is currently working with the University of Oxford to develop a vaccine. If AstraZeneca is successful, it will be responsible for global development and distribution of the vaccine.

UChicago Argonne is a company that manages and operates Argonne National Laboratory, a research facility within the University of Chicago originally dedicated to the development of nuclear reactors during the 1940s and 1950s. Most recently, Argonne has been mobilized to provide research on the novel coronavirus, receiving over $400 million in government contracts.

According to the lab’s website, Argonne is using its advanced photon source — the brightest X-ray beams in the United States — to study the structure of the coronavirus proteins. It is also working on the development of potential antiviral drugs and vaccines.

The Boston-based multinational conglomerate General Electric has received $417.6 million from the federal government in contracts related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Under current contractual terms, the company could potentially earn $1.7 million more. The bulk of the contacts’ value is to develop 50,000 ventilators before July 13.

In April, General Motors was awarded a government contract worth $476.1 million for the production of ventilators to be used for the treatment of COVID-19 patients. According to the HHS, GM is obligated to produce 30,000 ventilators by the end of August 2020. The production is taking place at a components plant in Kokomo, Indiana, where normal automobile production has been halted, and it is being done in partnership with U.S. medical device company Ventec Life Systems.

Virginia-based Science Applications International Corporation, or SAIC, has been paid nearly $80 million from the federal government since the beginning of the pandemic, and it could still receive six times that amount.

While the company has been providing special services during the pandemic, during normal times, its top customer is also the U.S. government. Rather than the DHS being its largest customer, however, the Army, Navy, and Department of Defense are. All told, the federal government accounted for 98% of the company’s $6.4 billion in revenue in the most recent fiscal year.

Hamilton Bonaduz AG is a global biotechnology company with operations in Reno, Nevada; Franklin, Massachusetts, Timișoara, Romania; and Bonaduz, Switzerland. The company was already paid over $550 million for a contract to manufacture 14,115 ventilators for use in COVID-19 treatment by July 3. To meet demand, Hamilton has partnered with General Motors to ramp up production at its facility in Reno, Nevada. It will also increase production at its Switzerland plant.

Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. is a manufacturer of scientific equipment based in Waltham, Massachusetts, with dozens of brands and subsidiaries. Partially through its subsidiary Remel Inc, Thermo Fisher has secured nearly $400 million in federal contracts for the production of medical instruments like swabs and test tubes. To help meet demand from COVID-19 contracts for viral transport technology, Thermo Fisher has been building a new manufacturing facility in Lenexa, Kansas

Belgian pharmaceutical company Janssen, a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary, could receive as much as $604.6 million from the HHS. The company, in collaboration with Emergent BioSolutions — another company on this list — and Catalent Biologics, is working to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. It anticipates that phase 1 clinical trials could begin by September 2020.

Maryland-based Emergent BioSolutions is one of several pharmaceutical companies on this list. The company has been paid $628.3 million from the HHS as part of what has been dubbed Operation Warp Speed, a White House program to develop a COVID-19 vaccine as quickly as possible. The company also recently struck an $87 million deal with British drugmaker AstraZeneca to manufacture the company’s experimental COVID-19 vaccine in the United States.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, electronic equipment manufacturer Philips Electronics has inked a number contracts with a few federal departments and agencies, most of which were with the Department of Veterans Affairs. The most lucrative contract, however, was with the HHS to make over $640 million worth of ventilators.

North Carolina-based apparel manufacturer Hanes has been paid over half a billion dollars from the federal government through COVID-19-related contracts. Over half of that money has come from the HHS for respiratory and contact protection. The company has also received millions of dollars from FEMA, an agency under the DHS for N95 face masks, resusuable gowns, and 2.4 million reusable cloth face masks. FEMA could tap the company for as many as 10 million cloth face masks in the near future.

Phlow Corp is a generic drug manufacturer that has been contracted by the federal government, in part, to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign-made generic pharmaceuticals. The company has received more than $360 million from the HHS to manufacture essential medicines and other drugs during the COVID-19 pandemic. If HHS exercises all negotiated contract options with the company, it could end up paying the company as much as $818.5 million.

InSysCo Inc. was an IT company that specialized in financial services for clients in the private and public sectors. In 2013, the company was bought by Acentia, and in 2015, Acentia was bought by MAXIMUS — a company that derives the majority of its annual revenue from government contracts and is the largest provider of Medicaid enrollment services. InSysCo Inc. is listed as having been awarded a $1 billion contract with the U.S. government during the COVID-19 pandemic.

RER Solutions is a data consultancy company based in Herndon, Virginia. The company has been awarded a contract worth a maximum of $1.0 billion for data analysis and loan recommendation services for the SBA’s COVID-19 relief program. Half of that total comes from an indefinite delivery contract (IDC) order worth potentially $500 million. According to reporting from The New York Times, RER has previously done work for the SBA, providing data infrastructure for processing disaster loan applications.

Parkdale Advanced Materials is a manufacturer of spun yarn based in Gastonia, North Carolina, that owns the brands Spunlab and U.S. Cotton. Like several of the country’s largest textile manufacturers, Parkdale has been mobilized to manufacture PPE materials during the coronavirus pandemic. The company has been awarded contracts worth a maximum of $1.1 billion for the manufacturing of cloth masks and reusable gowns. Parkdale is one of several textile manufacturers based in North Carolina — alongside Beverly Knits and HanesBrands — awarded hundreds of millions-worth federal contracts for the production of PPE.

St. Paul-based manufacturer 3M has been awarded 34 coronavirus-related contracts from the federal government worth a collective maximum of $1.3 billion, the most of any company. The bulk of the contract value comes from an indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity (IDIQ) order for surgical instruments and supplies worth a potential $1.0 billion. Other orders cover fixed quantities for N95 masks, stethoscopes, respiratory helmets, and other equipment for the nation’s health care and essential workers.