Environmental Science Associates

Environmental Science Associates (ESA), a 100% employee-owned, self-certified small disadvantaged business headquartered in San Francisco, California, delivers environmental consulting, cultural resource assessment, and ecological monitoring services to federal natural-resource and habitat-conservation agencies as a prime contractor (96% of recent awards). ESA competes predominantly on full-and-open vehicles rather than set-asides; while approximately half of recent awards carry total-small-business designations, the vendor's largest dollar positions sit on non-set-aside IDIQs and open-market delivery orders.

ESA's customer concentration centers on environmental stewardship agencies. The top five funding customers account for 48% of awards by count but 68% of combined potential value, reflecting a dollar-weighted skew toward large habitat and environmental-services IDIQs. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration dominates both dimensions (14 awards, $104.1 million combined potential value), anchored by two $50 million single-award regional architect-engineer IDIQs for the Pacific Coast and South Atlantic Coast regions under NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service Office of Habitat Conservation, both set aside for total small business and expiring July 2028. The Bureau of Reclamation follows ($10.5 million across 6 awards), including a $10 million single-award monitoring-services IDIQ for the Middle Rio Grande corridor awarded June 2024 and expiring June 2029. The Bureau of Land Management California Region (15 awards, $1.4 million), the Department of the Navy (13 awards), and the Department of the Army (10 awards) round out the active set. ESA holds a $4.9 million position on GSA's Multiple Award Schedule across 37 task orders, with GSA Federal Acquisition Service placing 7 delivery orders under The Professional Services Schedule.

Recent capability work exemplifies ESA's core portfolio. A $1.196 million time-and-materials delivery order from NOAA (April 2026, completion April 2029) supports national historic preservation action with a one-base-plus-two-option-year structure, performed from Seattle. A $998,158 time-and-materials delivery order from NOAA (September 2026, completion September 2028) funds hydro power and fish passage consultation for the Pacific region (San Francisco). A $818,625 delivery order from NOAA (September 2024, completion September 2027) addresses National Historic Preservation Act Section 106 compliance support. A $760,789 firm-fixed-price order (July 2024, completion July 2027) covers Powhatan Tug marine debris removal in Sitka, Alaska. A $319,275 firm-fixed-price GSA Multiple Award Schedule delivery order (September 2024, completion February 2026) procured a Class III cultural resources survey spanning 2,880 acres of Forest Service-administered lands in the Lake Tahoe Basin. A $640,270 definitive contract from the Forest Service Region 5 (September 2022, completion December 2023) covered cultural resource monitoring, updating, and re-recording for historic and prehistoric resources under a total-small-business set-aside. ESA's capability footprint spans cultural resource inventories and National Register eligibility determinations, habitat restoration feasibility studies and alternatives analysis, environmental compliance and permitting support, fish passage engineering design, erosion mitigation, marine debris assessment, archaeological surveys, data management systems development, and stakeholder engagement across four West Coast and regional geographic zones.

Activity has grown substantially year over year from 2022 through 2024, with 4 awards in 2022 climbing to 20 in 2024; activity dropped to 5 awards in 2025 and 3 year-to-date in 2026, reflecting the concentration of large multi-year IDIQs that gate incoming award counts rather than a revenue contraction. Combined potential value across all 120 awards totals $180.2 million, with $18.5 million (10% of potential value) obligated to date. Five awards (combined potential value $2.7 million) face ultimate completion within the next twenty-four months and therefore expose ESA to recompete risk during that window.

ESA holds a $499,986 single-award indefinite-delivery contract from the Fish and Wildlife Service Region 1 for cultural resource investigations across Regions 1 and 8 (December 2024, completion December 2027), covering cultural overviews, inventories, National Register eligibility determinations, and reporting in compliance with the National Historic Preservation Act across Oregon, Washington, Idaho, California, and Nevada. The solicitation contemplated a government-wide shared capacity of $500,000 across 2 to 5 IDIQs; ESA's single award represents the near-total pool. The vendor also holds a prime federal grant award: a $2.5 million cooperative agreement from USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service (August 2022, completion September 2027) to design and implement Agricultural Conservation Easement Program-Wetland Reserve Easement restoration plans while improving and protecting habitats for environmental benefits, performed in San Francisco.

On the subcontractor side, ESA delivers environmental and biologist consulting to Tetra TECH Inc. (seasonal and tidal wetland monitoring, vegetation transects, nest monitoring and predator exclosures, data management and quality control, Option Year 2 tasks under a multi-year program) and provides consulting services to CDM Federal Programs Corporation (Tracy Fish Collecting Facility modernization planning study). Five total sub awards comprise 4% of the recent award portfolio, reflecting an overwhelmingly prime-oriented business model.

SCI-reported invoiced revenue on federal services contracts above the $150,000 threshold totaled $836 thousand across the FY2022–FY2025 period, with $637 thousand invoiced in FY2025 alone across 1.2 FTEs at the contract level. This represents a strict subset of ESA's federal services revenue and excludes goods, products, micro-purchases, and classified work. Median government-paid rates on SCI-reportable prime contracts ran around $480/hr, with rates ranging from the 10th percentile at approximately $295/hr to the 90th percentile at approximately $5,059/hr. On its GSA Multiple Award Schedule, ESA lists 17 labor categories spanning project technicians through senior director roles at associate to bachelor's-degree levels, with hourly rates ranging from $92.74 to $304.60 and no security-clearance requirements.

The vendor primarily builds its own delivery teams; across SCI-reportable prime contracts, subcontractors performed on average 10% of contractor hours, with three named subcontractors identified in the SCI dataset. Primary NAICS codes cluster on environmental consulting services (42 awards) and remediation services (22 awards), with top PSCs centered on other environmental services, special studies and environmental assessments, and architect-and-engineering support.