oregon-stories · from the oregon-budget corpus
An Oregon agency's 20 largest payees absorb a median 88% of its recorded spending — and that is a floor
For each of 80 Oregon agencies in FY2025, the corpus asked one question of the recorded expenditure mirror: what share of the agency's total recorded spending went to its 20 largest payee strings? The median answer is 88% — and every one of these figures is a floor, because payee strings are not de-duplicated upstream. The spread runs from 42% (HUMAN SERVICES, DEPT OF, 7,906 payees) to the 8 small agencies whose 20-or-fewer payees make 100% an arithmetic certainty rather than a finding.
Top-20 payee share of recorded spending — one dot per agency, FY2025
Every share on this chart is a floor. Payee strings are not de-duplicated upstream — the same vendor can appear under several spellings — so real concentration is higher, never lower.
Concentration vs scale — share against total recorded expense (log scale), FY2025
Most concentrated at scale — the eight highest top-20 shares among agencies with at least 100 payees, FY2025
| agency (as recorded) | top-20 payee share | payees | FY2025 recorded expense |
|---|---|---|---|
| PUBLIC EMPS RETIREMENT SYS | 99.5% | 174 | $916,080,198 |
| LEGISLATIVE ADMIN CMTE | 98.5% | 227 | $178,913,223 |
| GOVERNOR, OFFICE OF THE | 93.0% | 137 | $3,600,852 |
| JUDICIAL DEPT | 92.8% | 1,492 | $275,265,718 |
| HI-ED COORD CMSN | 90.5% | 602 | $1,940,344,652 |
| HEALTH RELATED LICENSING BRDs | 90.1% | 116 | $1,541,115 |
| FOREST RESOURCES INST, OR | 89.0% | 134 | $2,458,561 |
| LABOR & IND, BUREAU OF | 88.9% | 172 | $10,276,447 |
Read this before quoting the chart
The export's own note, carried verbatim: GENERATED by src/build_story_exports.py — do not hand-edit. Per agency x fiscal year over the committed Parquet mirror (the same bytes the expenditure documents hash). VENDOR STRINGS ARE NOT DE-DUPLICATED upstream, so every top20_share here is a FLOOR — real concentration is higher, never lower. agency_registry_slug is null where no join doc carries one; null means unmapped, not unaffiliated.
How to read the numbers. 'Payees' are distinct payee strings in the state's expenditure records, not de-duplicated vendors — one vendor under three spellings counts three times, which can only push a top-20 share down; that is why every share is a floor. An agency with 20 or fewer payee strings shows 100% by construction; the most-concentrated table therefore admits only agencies with at least 100 payees, a threshold chosen here and stated here. Recorded expense is the agency's total spending from every source and implies nothing about appropriations. Coverage: 544 agency-year rows, FY2019–FY2025; the charts show FY2025 only. Concentration is a shape, not a verdict — a pass-through or grant-making agency is concentrated by design.