Naval Information Warfare Center Atlantic plans to hire the University of South Carolina, without competition, to measure the Navy command’s economic impact again.

In a notice posted Oct. 28 on SAM.gov, NIWC Atlantic said it intends to award USC a fixed-price purchase order, estimated at less than $350,000, for a comprehensive economic impact assessment of its business activities in South Carolina, Virginia, Louisiana and outlying detachments.

USC completed the previous assessments “using proprietary methodologies and algorithms that are essential to enable longitudinal analysis and direct data comparisons,” the notice says. Questions may be submitted within 15 days, and any decision not to compete the work is solely the government’s, according to the notice.

NIWC Atlantic paid USC $176,000 and $242,000, without competition, for economic impact analyses ordered in November 2022 and September 2024, according to USAspending.gov.

The last study, by USC’s Darla Moore School of Business, put the command’s economic impact in fiscal 2024 at $10 billion nationally and $2.1 billion in South Carolina. NIWC Atlantic announced the results on June 30, 2025. Nationally, that activity supported 41,419 jobs and $3.8 billion in labor income, the command said. The study also found that NIWC Atlantic employs about 90% of the electronics engineers in Charleston.

The study before that, announced in September 2023, measured fiscal 2022 and put the impact at $9.3 billion nationally and $3.2 billion in South Carolina. The 2025 study also estimated earlier years. For fiscal 2022, it put the South Carolina figure at about $2.1 billion and said the command’s impact in the state was relatively consistent from year to year. Its fiscal 2022 estimate for Virginia, home to the command’s second-largest workforce, was about $2.5 billion, compared with $1.6 billion in the earlier study. The 2025 study does not explain the differences.

Charleston remains the command’s largest location, with 3,055 civilian employees and 19 military members in nearly 80 facilities covering 1.3 million square feet, according to NIWC Atlantic’s website. Most of those facilities sit in the south annex of the Naval Weapons Station at Joint Base Lindsey Graham, formerly Joint Base Charleston.