Commonwealth Scientific And Industrial Research Organisation

Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, doing business as CSIRO, is an Australian non-profit national science agency that operates as a prime contractor and recipient on federal research and environmental-remediation contracts and grants, competing full-and-open without set-aside designations across civilian and defense agencies. CSIRO's federal footprint spans 88 awards (81 prime, 7 sub) with $223.7 million combined potential value, though concentration is extreme: a single NASA Jet Propulsion Lab contract carries $206.5 million, representing 92% of combined potential value and dwarfing all other work.

CSIRO's capability portfolio centers on three distinct domains. The largest is environmental remediation research and development—specifically per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) detection, destruction, and mitigation. CSIRO holds prime contracts from the Army Corps of Engineers' Humphreys Engineer Center Support Activity totaling $3.6 million across nine awards, including a $1.7 million definitive contract for SERDP Project ER24-4073 investigating thermal decomposition of PFAS in commercial hazardous waste incinerators (awarded April 2024, ultimate completion April 2028), a $1.07 million cost-no-fee contract for development and validation of PFAS-mitigating sealants in concrete (SERDP ER23-3638, April 2024), and an $877.7 thousand contract for high-field 21 Tesla mass spectrometry forensic identification of PFAS compounds (SERDP ER20-1265, July 2023). The second capability is ecosystem modeling, particularly the proprietary Atlantis C++ simulation platform: CSIRO holds multiple purchase orders from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration totaling $1.4 million across twelve awards for tools, improvements, and training supporting fisheries and food-web modeling under climate-change and invasive-species scenarios. The third is scientific journal publishing and literature access: CSIRO holds five awards totaling approximately $536 thousand from USDA's Agricultural Research Service and Central Program Planning Coordination and Support for enterprise-wide perpetual electronic access to CSIRO-published scientific journals with read-and-publish rights. Smaller work includes a $903.6 thousand firm-fixed-price contract from the Army's DEVCOM (awarded September 2023) for research on insect-larvae platform technology to degrade contaminating plastics, an $84.6 thousand purchase order for MAIA Mapper X-Ray Fluorescence analytical chemistry services, and a $175 thousand Army pilot study on Indo-Pacific logistical hazards conducted at Learmonth Royal Australian Air Force Base.

Customer concentration by award volume is fragmented—NOAA leads with 12 awards, followed by USDA Agricultural Research Service (11 awards), Army RDECOM (10 awards), and Army Corps of Engineers (9 awards)—but dollar concentration is singular and non-replicable. NASA JPL represents a structural outlier: one contract with $206.5 million potential value overshadows the next four largest customers combined. The recompete cliff shows acute concentration risk: six awards with ultimate completion dates in the next twenty-four months carry combined potential value of $211.2 million, driven entirely by the NASA JPL contract maturing on that timeline.

CSIRO operates predominantly as a prime (92% of awards) with minimal subcontracting; it also holds one federal grant prime award as a recipient of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases funding for bat cellular immunity research (awarded May 2022, completion April 2026), and serves as a subcontractor to Colorado State University and Texas Tech University System on SERDP PFAS-related research projects, providing computational chemistry, predictive modeling, and leaching-assessment development.

Service Contract Inventory data captures minimal CSIRO activity: nine SCI-reportable prime contracts generated $298 thousand in invoiced revenue in FY2023 across 0.8 FTEs, with median government-paid hourly rates of $176.47/hr. SCI coverage is sparse and non-representative; most CSIRO federal work flows through research and development contracts, purchase orders for specialized services (ecosystem modeling, analytical instrumentation, journal access), and grants that fall outside SCI's $150 thousand reporting threshold or outside SCI's scope (goods, classified work, non-federal revenue). SCI figures do not reflect CSIRO's actual federal footprint or total enterprise scale.