Administration of General Economic Programs (NAICS 926110): An Investor's Primer

1. Overview

NAICS 926110 is not an industry you can buy a piece of. Under the U.S. Census Bureau's 2022 North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), it covers the government establishments that "administer, promote, and develop economic resources, including business, industry, and tourism," plus the offices that produce general economic and statistical data.[1] In plain terms, it is the machinery of government economic policy: the federal, state, and local agencies that run economic-development programs, hand out business incentives, staff small-business and trade offices, and publish the official statistics that markets trade on.

Best understood, it is a policy-and-procurement ecosystem. Its economic weight is set by public budgets, grants, contract awards, and political priorities — not by consumer demand or industrial capacity. There is no direct way to own it, but two groups of investors are exposed:

• Public-market investors. These agencies produce the data your portfolio reprices on every month — the jobs report, gross domestic product (GDP), inflation — and they sustain a multibillion-dollar ecosystem of publicly traded government-services and public-sector-software firms that build and run their programs.[9]
• Private investors. This is the plumbing behind real capital-allocation tools: Small Business Administration (SBA) loan guarantees, Small Business Investment Company (SBIC) leverage, state and local tax incentives, Opportunity Zones (OZ), and New Markets Tax Credits (NMTC). Billions in private capital flow through the programs these agencies administer, and private equity (PE) owns several of the largest firms that serve them.[5][4]

Every investable angle is one step removed — a firm that serves the agencies, or a private vehicle that plugs into their programs. This primer maps both.

2. What it is and how it's structured

Scope. NAICS 926110 sits inside Sector 92 (Public Administration), industry group 9261 (Administration of Economic Programs). It captures government units whose primary mission is general economic promotion, development, and statistics. Illustrative activities from the Census definition: economic-development agencies, small-business development agencies, government trade commissions, consumer-protection offices, tourism and industry-promotion agencies, and general economic-statistics offices.[1]

In practice that includes, at the federal level, bodies such as the Economic Development Administration (EDA), the SBA, the International Trade Administration (ITA), and the government's statistical agencies — the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the Census Bureau, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). At the state level, departments of commerce and economic development and state tourism offices. At the local level, city and county economic-development departments.

What it excludes (and where those activities go). The code is "general" economics only. Adjacent administration lives in sibling codes:

Central banking is not here either: the Federal Reserve Banks are in 521110 (Monetary Authorities–Central Bank) and the Fed's Board of Governors and general public-finance/tax administration in 921130 (Public Finance Activities).[8]

Ownership mix. This is essentially a 100% government industry. In BLS employment data, national activity in 926110 appears only under federal, state, and local government ownership.[2] Private contractors are economically important but are not classified here — a software vendor is coded to software, a consultancy to consulting — so a contractor's government revenue is a proxy for exposure to 926110-related spending, not reported revenue from the code itself.[3]

3. How big it is

Our ground-truth posture. Our ingested federal-statistics file for NAICS 926110 contains no metrics for this node, so every figure below is drawn from cited BLS, Census, and Government Accountability Office (GAO) sources and labeled as such. That absence is expected: Public Administration (Sector 92) is deliberately excluded from the Census Bureau's Economic Census and largely from County Business Patterns (CBP), which tabulate private employers, not government establishments.[3] So there is no "receipts," "sales," or private-establishment count to report — and no small-operator undercount in the usual sense. The right lens for a public-administration code is government employment and payroll.

Direct measure — BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW), 2024 annual averages, NAICS 926110 (national):[2]

Federal government is the largest slice — about 52% of employment — reflecting the concentration of well-paid economists, statisticians, and analysts in federal statistical and economic agencies. Year over year in 2024, federal employment in the code edged down about 1.1%, while state government rose about 4.8% and local about 7.3%, consistent with an active state and local economic-development push.[2] For an order-of-magnitude workforce picture only, the Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS) lumps this activity with space research into "Administration of economic programs and space research," a wider aggregate that counted roughly 551,800 workers in 2021 at an average wage near $76,400.[7]

The surrounding procurement environment — the money that flows to the investable proxies, not the size of 926110 itself — is far larger. Governmentwide federal contract obligations reached about $759 billion in fiscal year (FY) 2023, split roughly $248 billion of civilian-agency and $230 billion of defense-agency service contracts; the GAO estimates federal contracts associated with consulting services exceeded $500 billion across FY2019–FY2023.[9][10] Small businesses won a record $183.27 billion — 28.78% of federal prime-contract dollars — in FY2024.[11] Only a slice of that touches general economic programs, but it is the pool the listed contractors draw from.

4. The investable universe

There is no pure-play public company and no direct private equity in NAICS 926110 itself — you cannot own an economic-development agency. Exposure is entirely indirect, in three buckets. Exposure varies by customer, contract, and segment, so treat every name below as a proxy, not a pure play.

A. Public firms that build and run these programs (software, consulting, program operations, statistical/IT systems):

Most are diversified across defense, health, and civilian agencies; economic-program work is one line within a broad federal book. Broad government-IT peers CGI Inc. (NYSE: GIB) and Accenture Federal (part of NYSE: ACN) serve the same agencies. Amentum only became public in 2024, combining with Jacobs' Critical Mission Solutions and Cyber and Intelligence units; its PE owners beforehand were American Securities and Lindsay Goldberg.[21]

B. Major private owners and platforms — the PE route for private investors:

C. Private vehicles that plug into agency programs — the most direct route for private capital, and where the "money flows through the code" story is strongest:

• SBA-linked lending and BDCs. SBA 7(a) guarantees are originated by private banks and funds; publicly traded 7(a) lenders include Live Oak Bancshares (NYSE: LOB), NewtekOne (NASDAQ: NEWT), and Byline Bancorp (NYSE: BY). SBIC licenses sit inside many private-credit funds and some business development companies (BDCs), where SBA-guaranteed leverage is a subsidized funding source.[5]
• Place-based tax-incentive funds. Opportunity Zone funds and New Markets Tax Credit vehicles are private-capital products created and administered through these agencies — Treasury's Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI) Fund and state economic-development offices.[4]

5. How the money works

There are two distinct money stories here: the agencies' (public finance) and the vendors' (contract economics).

The agencies: budgets in, capital and information out.

1. They run on appropriations, not revenue. Federal units are funded by congressional appropriations; state and local units by their budgets. Scale is modest relative to the economy — the EDA, the only federal agency devoted solely to economic development, received about $468 million in base annual appropriations in both FY2024 and FY2025 (excluding one-time supplementals),[6] and total 926110 payroll was roughly $9.4 billion in 2024.[2] Economic-development money often moves as competitive grants, technical assistance, and matching funds rather than direct spending.[13]
2. They move far more private capital than they spend. In FY2024 the SBA's 7(a) program approved 70,242 loans totaling about $31.1 billion, and the SBIC program — 318 licensed SBICs — invested roughly $7.26 billion in 1,014 small businesses, backed by about $21.1 billion of SBA-guaranteed leverage.[5] Economist Timothy Bartik of the W.E. Upjohn Institute puts state and local business incentives at roughly $50–60 billion a year (2023 dollars), with some estimates higher — a large, mostly discretionary pool that private developers compete for.[4]
3. Their output is market-moving information. The statistical agencies inside the code produce the jobs report, GDP, and inflation data — releases that reprice bonds, currencies, and equities within seconds. It is a public good whose value is realized entirely by the investors and firms that consume it.

The vendors: how contractors get paid. Private firms earn revenue through prime contracts, subcontracts, software subscriptions, transaction fees, and managed operations. The Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) distinguishes firm-fixed-price, cost-reimbursement, incentive, indefinite-delivery, and time-and-materials contracts: fixed-price puts the most cost risk on the contractor; cost-reimbursement shifts it to the government.[28] ICF's 2025 revenue mix illustrates the trade-off — 50% fixed-price, 43% time-and-materials, 7% cost-based.[15] Labor, not raw materials or physical capacity, is the main input, so the metrics that matter are funded backlog and remaining performance obligations, award and recompete win rates, prime-versus-subcontractor mix, customer/program concentration, billable utilization, wage inflation, fixed-price cost-to-complete performance, and cash conversion.

6. What drives demand

• The business cycle (counter-cyclical for the agencies). Recessions raise demand for stimulus administration, SBA lending, and EDA recovery and disaster grants; expansions shift the focus to recruitment and incentives. Disasters and industrial transitions add episodic, not steady, demand.
• Industrial policy. Reshoring and place-based programs — the CHIPS and Science Act and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) era — have elevated economic-development activity and the incentive arms race between states.
• Interstate/inter-city competition. States and cities bid against each other for plants and headquarters, sustaining the incentive pool Bartik measures.[4]
• Digital government. Governments are replacing fragmented systems for budgeting, taxation, payments, permitting, and licensing; Tyler cites administrative modernization, transparency, revenue collection, and workforce constraints as core technology drivers.[14]
• Program complexity and accountability. Agencies need research, program design, evaluation, and reporting to show that public funds work — the demand ICF's evaluation and implementation work serves.[15]
• The decennial cycle. Census-year run-ups (next: 2030) surge statistical-agency staffing and contracting.
• AI and automation. Artificial intelligence (AI) can automate casework, improve fraud detection, and raise productivity, but adoption is limited by data quality, security, procurement rules, public trust, and legacy-system integration.[14]
• Federal budget posture. Appropriations and efficiency drives set the ceiling on federal headcount — visible in the ~1% federal employment dip in 2024 even as state and local grew.[2]

7. Regulation

Two layers matter, because here the "industry" is partly the regulator and partly the customer.

Governing the agencies themselves. Agencies are created and bounded by authorizing statutes and annual appropriations, operate under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), and answer to congressional oversight, the GAO, and inspectors general (IGs). The statistical agencies carry an extra layer: legal confidentiality protections (Title 13 of the U.S. Code for the Census Bureau, and the government-wide Confidential Information Protection and Statistical Efficiency Act, CIPSEA) and professional-independence norms meant to keep official data free of political interference.

Governing the contractors and grantees. FAR governs contract types, competition, pricing, and ethics, and its integrity rules restrict organizational conflicts of interest (OCI) — a firm that helps design an acquisition may be barred from bidding on the resulting work.[28][29] Federal awards passed to states, localities, and vendors are subject to the Uniform Guidance in Title 2 of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), Part 200.[30] The government maintains a goal of directing at least 23% of prime-contract dollars to small businesses, with set-asides creating entry points for smaller vendors.[12] Vendors handling citizen, financial, or business data face contract-specific privacy, cybersecurity, and records requirements; a compliance failure can mean payment delays, termination, penalties, or debarment.

8. Competitive dynamics and consolidation

There is no product market inside 926110, but two competitive arenas shape returns.

Among vendors, the market is fragmented — Tyler names large public companies, consulting firms, smaller private firms, new entrants, and internal government IT departments as competitors.[14] Bids turn on past performance and agency relationships, access to contract vehicles and task orders, domain expertise, security certifications, specialized-labor recruiting, and price/risk appetite. The federal professional-services and IT layer has consolidated for years: Guidehouse acquired Grant Thornton's public-sector advisory practice in 2022,[27] Bain bought Guidehouse for $5.3 billion in 2023,[22] Carlyle took ManTech private near $4.2 billion in 2022,[24] and Amentum's 2024 combination with Jacobs' government units moved a large private platform into public markets.[21] Consolidation buys scale and broader contract vehicles but adds debt, integration risk, and exposure to large recompetes — and the government can always insource, delay, or pick a cheaper bidder.

Among governments, states and localities compete aggressively for private investment, which keeps incentives elevated but draws persistent criticism: research finds a large share of incentives go to firms that would have located there anyway, so measured returns are often low — a live policy debate that shapes program budgets.[4]

9. Risks

• Appropriations and policy risk. Budget cuts, continuing resolutions, shutdowns, program cancellations, or a change of administration can delay awards and shrink demand — and disrupt contractor cash flow.
• Reorganization risk. Agencies can be merged, restructured, or targeted by efficiency campaigns; EDA reauthorization and reorganization proposals recur.
• Procurement risk. Long sales cycles, bid protests, and shifting requirements make revenue timing uncertain; an RFP (request for proposals) can take years to become an award.[14]
• Contract-execution risk. Fixed-price work can produce cost overruns when staffing, scope, or delivery assumptions are wrong.[28]
• Labor risk. Economists, engineers, developers, and security-cleared staff are expensive and hard to replace.
• Customer concentration. A contractor can depend on a few agencies, programs, or vehicles even when its client list looks broad.
• Compliance and reputation risk. Improper billing, conflicts of interest, or data misuse can trigger fines, debarment, and contract loss.[29]
• Statistical-integrity risk. Falling survey response rates and tight budgets threaten data quality; perceived political interference in official statistics is a tail risk for everyone who trades on the data.
• Incentive-program risk. If states retrench on incentives — or evidence of weak returns forces reform — the private-development and site-selection pipeline narrows.[4]
• Measurement risk. 926110 is a government-function code; a company with heavy government revenue may still have little direct exposure to general economic programs. Underwrite the contract and funding chain, not the NAICS label.

10. How to invest, and the outlook

Public-market routes. There is no direct exposure, so separate the proxies by what they actually do:

• Administrative software: Tyler Technologies (TYL).[14]
• Program design and evaluation: ICF International (ICFI).[15]
• Program operations and benefits: Maximus (MMS).[16]
• Federal consulting and technology: Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH).[17]
• Broad government technology and services: Leidos (LDOS), SAIC, Amentum (AMTM) — stronger government exposure but broader and more defense-/mission-oriented than 926110.[18][19][20]
• The credit programs: SBA-linked bank lenders — Live Oak (LOB), NewtekOne (NEWT), Byline (BY).[5]

Judge each on public-sector revenue, federal-versus-state/local and civilian-versus-defense mix, backlog quality, contract type, recompete schedule, margins, cash conversion, and leverage. Ticker exposure alone is not enough.

Private-market routes. Two flavors. Buy the vendors: PE, growth equity, or private credit in firms such as Guidehouse, Peraton, and ManTech, or smaller contractors with specialized contract vehicles — diligencing funded backlog, customer concentration, termination rights, fixed-price exposure, labor retention, and renewal probability.[22][23][24] Or plug into the programs: SBIC-licensed private-credit funds and BDCs (subsidized SBA leverage), Opportunity Zone and New Markets Tax Credit funds, and real-estate or plant investments structured around state and local incentives.[5][4] Tracking where the EDA, state commerce departments, and Treasury's incentive programs are steering capital is a genuine edge in site selection and deal sourcing.

Outlook. Demand for secure public-sector software, administrative modernization, program operations, grants management, and economic-development support should stay durable but uneven; vendors that combine domain expertise, recurring software, strong compliance, and multiyear relationships are best positioned. The main counterforce is policy volatility — spending controls, insourcing, procurement delays, and labor inflation can overwhelm an otherwise attractive modernization trend. The 2024 picture — federal headcount down ~1% while state and local economic-development employment grew 5–7% — is likely to persist as federal budgets face efficiency pressure and interstate competition keeps state and local incentives elevated.[2] Two swing factors to watch: the fate of federal industrial-policy funding, and the health of the statistical agencies heading into the 2030 census — the first reshapes contractor demand, the second the reliability of the data every investor uses. These are judgments about direction, not settled facts; the underlying programs move with each budget and election.

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Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau, "2022 NAICS Definition — 926110 Administration of General Economic Programs" (2022). https://www.census.gov/naics/?chart=2022&details=926110&input=926110
2. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages — NAICS 926110, 2024 annual averages (national, by ownership)" (2025). QCEW Open Data API: https://data.bls.gov/cew/data/api/2024/a/industry/926110.csv
3. U.S. Census Bureau, "Understanding NAICS / Economic Census & County Business Patterns coverage excludes Public Administration (NAICS 92)" (2022–2024). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/economic-census/year/2022/guidance/understanding-naics.html and https://www.census.gov/data/datasets/2022/econ/cbp/2022-cbp.html
4. W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, Timothy J. Bartik, "Business Incentives / Making Sense of Incentives" (2019, updated). https://www.upjohn.org/business-incentives and https://www.upjohn.org/research-highlights/making-sense-incentives-taming-business-incentives-promote-prosperity
5. U.S. Small Business Administration, "7(a) & 504 Activity Reports: FY2024 Year End" and SBIC program FY2024 data. https://data.sba.gov/en/dataset/7-a-504-activity-reports-fy2024-year-end and https://www.sba.gov/partners/sbics/manage-sbic
6. Congressional Research Service, "Economic Development Administration: An Overview of Programs and Appropriations," Report R46991 (2025). https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R46991
7. Data USA (U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey), "Administration of economic programs & space research" industry-group profile (2021). https://datausa.io/profile/naics/administration-of-economic-programs-space-research
8. U.S. Census Bureau, "2022 NAICS — 521110 Monetary Authorities–Central Bank (Federal Reserve Banks) and 921130 Public Finance Activities (Fed Board of Governors)" (2022). https://www.census.gov/naics/?input=521110&year=2022 and https://www.census.gov/naics/?input=921130&year=2022
9. U.S. Government Accountability Office, "A Snapshot: Government-Wide Contracting — A 2023 Update" (2024). https://files.gao.gov/multimedia/Federal_Government_Contracting/index.html
10. U.S. Government Accountability Office, "Federal Contracting" (consulting-services spending, FY2019–FY2023), GAO-24-106932 (2024). https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-106932
11. U.S. Small Business Administration, "Record-Breaking $183B in Federal Contracts to Small Businesses in FY2024" (2025). https://www.sba.gov/article/2025/01/10/biden-harris-administration-awards-record-breaking-183b-federal-contracts-small-businesses-marking
12. U.S. Small Business Administration, "Contracting Assistance Programs" (23% small-business goal) (2025). https://www.sba.gov/federal-contracting/contracting-assistance-programs
13. U.S. Economic Development Administration, "Funding Opportunities" (2026). https://www.eda.gov/funding/funding-opportunities
14. Tyler Technologies, Inc., Annual Report on Form 10-K, FY2025 (2026). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/860731/000086073126000016/tyl-20251231.htm
15. ICF International, "ICF Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Results" (2026). https://www.icf.com/news/2026/02/icf-reports-fourth-quarter-and-full-year-2025-results
16. Maximus, Inc., Annual Report on Form 10-K, FY2025 (2026). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1032220/000103222026000014/mms-20251231.htm
17. Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp., Annual Report on Form 10-K (~98% U.S. government revenue) (2026). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1443646/000162828026037521/bah-20260331.htm
18. Leidos Holdings, Inc., Annual Report on Form 10-K, FY2025 (2026). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1336920/000133692026000030/ldos-20260102.htm
19. Science Applications International Corp., Annual Report on Form 10-K, FY2025 (2025). https://investors.saic.com/node/15576/html
20. Amentum Holdings, Inc., Annual Report on Form 10-K, FY2025 (2026). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2011286/000162828026006676/amtm-20260102.htm
21. Amentum, "Amentum Completes Combination with Jacobs' Critical Mission Solutions and Cyber and Intelligence Units" (2024). https://ir.amentum.com/news/news-details/2024/Amentum-Completes-Transformational-Combination-with-Jacobs-Critical-Mission-Solutions-and-Cyber-and-Intelligence-Units/default.aspx
22. Guidehouse, "Guidehouse Completes Transaction with Bain Capital" ($5.3B, from Veritas Capital) (2023). https://guidehouse.com/news/corporate-news/2023/guidehouse-completes-transaction-with-bain-capital
23. Peraton, "Peraton Appoints Steve Schorer as Chief Executive Officer" (Veritas Capital ownership) (2024). https://www.peraton.com/news/peraton-appoints-steve-schorer-as-chief-executive-officer
24. The Carlyle Group, "Carlyle to Acquire ManTech" (~$4.2B) (2022). https://www.carlyle.com/media-room/news-release-archive/carlyle-acquire-mantech
25. Westat, "Careers and Employee Ownership" (ESOP) (2026). https://www.westat.com/careers/
26. U.S. Census Bureau, "2022 NAICS: Sector 54 — Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services" (consulting classifications 541611/541618/541720) (2022); and Deloitte Global, "Network Structure" (2026). https://www.census.gov/naics/?details=541&input=541&year=2022 and https://www.deloitte.com/global/en/about/governance/network-brand-alliances.html
27. Guidehouse, "Guidehouse to Acquire Grant Thornton LLP's Public Sector Advisory Practice" (2022). https://guidehouse.com/news/corporate-news/2022/guidehouse-to-acquire-grant-thornton-llps-public-sector-practice
28. Federal Acquisition Regulation, "Part 16 — Types of Contracts." https://www.acquisition.gov/far/part-16
29. Federal Acquisition Regulation, "Part 3 — Improper Business Practices and Personal Conflicts of Interest" and "Subpart 9.5 — Organizational and Consultant Conflicts of Interest." https://www.acquisition.gov/far/part-3 and https://www.acquisition.gov/far/subpart-9.5
30. Electronic Code of Federal Regulations, "Title 2, Part 200 — Uniform Administrative Requirements, Cost Principles, and Audit Requirements for Federal Awards." https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-2/subtitle-A/chapter-II/part-200