The “Department of War” is the same cabinet‑level organization that has long been known as the U.S. Department of Defense. In September 2025, President Trump signed an executive order to rebrand the Department of Defense as the “Department of War,” changing the department’s public name and titles (e.g., “secretary of war”) but not creating a new agency or changing its core mission of overseeing the U.S. military.
Congress is still considering legislation to permanently codify the new name, but in practice the department, its leadership, and its functions are the same institution previously called the Department of Defense.
Both War.gov and Defense.gov are official U.S. government websites operated by the same department. After the renaming push, the department began using “U.S. Department of War” branding and the War.gov domain, but Defense.gov pages still exist and often display the same content.
For contract announcements, the canonical listing is on the Department’s contracts page (currently available at both war.gov/News/Contracts and defense.gov/News/Contracts). You can safely use either, but the text of recent notices now points readers to War.gov.
Full contract details—including contractor names, dollar amounts, contract numbers, and primary work locations—are published in the daily “Contracts for [date]” articles on the Department’s contracts page. For the Dec. 17, 2025 awards, those details appear in the specific contract notice linked in your article (e.g., defense.gov/News/Contracts/Contract/Article/4362955/ or the equivalent on War.gov), where each award is described in several sentences.
If that page is unavailable, the same text is often mirrored by third‑party sites such as GlobalSecurity.org, which reproduces the full Dec. 17, 2025 contract listing.
The $7.5 million threshold is an internal reporting policy: the Department publicly summarizes only contract actions at or above that value in its daily contract announcements. The contracts page explicitly states that “contracts valued at $7.5 million or more are announced each business day at 5 p.m.” Smaller awards are still made but are typically accessible through other federal procurement and spending databases rather than these daily press-style summaries.
These contract summaries are published once each business day. The contracts page explains that contracts valued at $7.5 million or more “are announced each business day at 5 p.m.,” and the archive shows a separate “Contracts for [date]” entry for each weekday.
Within the Department, the contracting offices that award each contract (for example, the Defense Health Agency’s Managed Care Contracting Division or the Naval Sea Systems Command) are responsible for the accuracy of the award information. Those offices transmit award data to the Pentagon’s public affairs/press office, which compiles them into the official daily “Contracts for [date]” notices that appear on War.gov/Defense.gov.
Contract integrity and compliance are also overseen by entities such as the Defense Contract Management Agency and service‑specific contracting commands, but the day‑to‑day publication of the notices is handled by the Department’s public communications apparatus using data provided by the contracting activities.