The most-watched drug launch of the decade left a paper trail nobody reads. US military pharmacies ordered GLP-1 drugs 26,252 times in the first nine months of 2025 — every pen, vial, and tablet bottle a separate line in the federal procurement record. The order-level data shows the class exploding, Eli Lilly closing a four-to-one gap against Novo Nordisk to near parity, and the weight-loss-only brands going from 2.5% of the military's orders to 40% — one delivery order at a time.
On 10 September 2025, the Department of Defense placed 18 orders for Mounjaro pens, 28 for Trulicity, 19 for Ozempic, and 2 for Rybelsus tablets — 67 GLP-1 line items in a single day, each a separate, individually priced delivery order in the federal procurement record. The lines read like pharmacy shelf labels: "MOUNJARO 7.5 MG/0.5 ML PEN 0.5ML." That is the granularity at which the United States government discloses what its military health system buys.
Most analysis of the GLP-1 boom works from company earnings, prescription panels, and survey data. But there is a public, official, order-level record of one of the largest institutional drug buyers in the world — and it has been quietly documenting the entire launch curve. Valan's Crucible award spine holds 75,931,039 public contract awards across 150+ sources; 3,112,628 of them are pharmaceutical. Within that, we isolated every US federal order naming a GLP-1 molecule or brand: semaglutide (Ozempic, Wegovy, Rybelsus), tirzepatide (Mounjaro, Zepbound), dulaglutide (Trulicity), liraglutide (Victoza, Saxenda), and exenatide (Byetta, Bydureon).
The result: 92,048 individual federal orders naming a GLP-1 molecule or brand, spanning the complete reporting window from October 2021 — when the line-item record begins — to September 2025, the last complete month of military pharmacy data. 99.99% were placed by the Department of Defense for its military pharmacy system; the annual counts and per-molecule counts in this piece each sum to that figure exactly.
In 2022, the first full year of the record, federal buyers placed 15,070 GLP-1 orders worth $88.0 million. By 2024 that had grown to 27,671 orders worth $184.8 million. The first nine months of 2025 alone: 26,252 orders worth $235.2 million — already 27% above all of 2024 in dollar terms, with a quarter of the year still unrecorded.
The value curve is steeper than the order curve: the average GLP-1 order grew from $5,838 in 2022 to $8,959 in 2025. The military health system is not just ordering more often — each order is larger.
Inside the class total, the data records a two-horse race between Novo Nordisk's semaglutide and Eli Lilly's tirzepatide with quarterly resolution. In the first quarter of 2023, military pharmacies placed 1,010 semaglutide orders against 254 for tirzepatide — a four-to-one advantage for Novo. Eleven quarters later, in Q3 2025, the count was 3,557 to 3,506. Parity, within 1.5%.
| Quarter | Semaglutide orders | Tirzepatide orders | Ratio | Sema USD | Tirz USD |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q1 2023 | 1,010 | 254 | 4.0 : 1 | $4.0M | $0.7M |
| Q1 2024 | 1,696 | 1,182 | 1.4 : 1 | $9.8M | $5.6M |
| Q1 2025 | 3,150 | 2,413 | 1.3 : 1 | $34.6M | $16.5M |
| Q2 2025 | 3,601 | 3,278 | 1.1 : 1 | $38.6M | $27.2M |
| Q3 2025 | 3,557 | 3,506 | 1.01 : 1 | $49.1M | $38.4M |
Eli Lilly's tirzepatide erased Novo Nordisk's four-to-one order advantage in eleven quarters — a market-share shift usually inferred from prescription panels, here visible directly in an official government purchase record, order by order.
The same record documents the other side of the launch: the molecules being replaced. Dulaglutide — Lilly's own Trulicity, the workhorse of the class before Ozempic — peaked at 12,080 military pharmacy orders in 2023 and fell to 6,500 in the first nine months of 2025, with nine-month dollar value of $29.3 million against $71.4 million in full-year 2023. Liraglutide dwindled from 816 orders in 2022 to 139. Exenatide is down to 108.
| Molecule (brands) | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 (9mo) | 2025 USD | Trajectory |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Semaglutide (Ozempic, Wegovy, Rybelsus) | 1,756 | 4,838 | 8,567 | 10,308 | $122.3M | Leader |
| Tirzepatide (Mounjaro, Zepbound) | 144 | 1,723 | 6,510 | 9,197 | $82.1M | Surging |
| Dulaglutide (Trulicity) | 10,644 | 12,080 | 11,700 | 6,500 | $29.3M | Fading |
| Liraglutide (Victoza, Saxenda) | 816 | 601 | 460 | 139 | $0.9M | Residual |
| Exenatide (Byetta, Bydureon) | 1,710 | 645 | 434 | 108 | $0.7M | Residual |
In 2022, the new-generation molecules — semaglutide and tirzepatide — accounted for 12.6% of federal GLP-1 orders. In 2025, 74.3%. A complete generational handover in an institutional formulary, executed in three years, and legible in public data at weekly-injection-pen resolution.
"The federal record does not summarise. It lists every pen, every vial, every 30-tablet bottle — 53,923 times since January 2024."
The class total hides two different medicines wearing the same molecules. Semaglutide and tirzepatide are each sold under a diabetes brand and a separate, higher-dose obesity brand: Ozempic and Wegovy are the same drug; Mounjaro and Zepbound are the same drug. The brands carry different FDA approvals, and the procurement record names the brand on every line — so the one question everyone asks about the GLP-1 boom, is this diabetes or is this weight loss, is answerable directly.
Split the military health system's brand-named orders by what the brand is approved to treat, and the weight-loss line is unmistakable. The obesity-only brands — Wegovy, Zepbound, and Saxenda, drugs with no diabetes indication — went from 381 orders worth $2.5 million in 2022 to 10,457 orders worth $101.8 million in the first nine months of 2025. Diabetes-brand orders grew too, but far slower. In 2022, obesity-only brands were 2.5% of the military's brand-named GLP-1 orders. In 2025, they were 40% — and 43% of the dollars.
| Year | Diabetes-brand orders | Obesity-only orders | Obesity USD | Obesity share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 14,675 | 381 | $2.5M | 2.5% |
| 2023 | 18,229 | 1,619 | $7.5M | 8.2% |
| 2024 | 22,612 | 4,966 | $34.8M | 18.0% |
| 2025 (9mo) | 15,681 | 10,457 | $101.8M | 40.0% |
The single steepest curve in the entire dataset belongs to Zepbound, Eli Lilly's obesity brand. It received FDA approval in November 2023; its first military pharmacy order appears in the record on 11 December 2023, and it has since reached 7,538 orders. A drug went from approval to a federal formulary line in five weeks, and the procurement data caught it — a demonstration that this record tracks a launch in near real time, not in retrospect.
This is the answer to why a defence department is one of the biggest visible GLP-1 buyers in the country. The Department of Defense line in this data is not the fighting force — it is the military health system, a payer for millions of active-duty personnel, retirees, and family members. And a rising share of what it buys is not for diabetes at all. It is paying, at scale, for its beneficiaries to lose weight.
One honest boundary on this split: it classifies orders by what each brand is approved to treat, not by each patient's diagnosis. A clinician can prescribe a diabetes brand off-label for weight management, so the diabetes column is an upper bound on diabetes use and the obesity column a lower bound on weight-loss use. The direction of the trend — and the explosive growth of the obesity-only brands, which have no other use — is not in question.
The supplier column tells its own story. Of the 53,923 federal GLP-1 orders placed since January 2024, 53,038 — 98.4% — name a single supplier: AmerisourceBergen Drug Corp (renamed Cencora in 2023; the procurement record carries the legal contracting-entity name), the pharmaceutical prime vendor through which the military health system routes its pharmacy resupply, for $416.4 million in order value over the period. The remainder is split among small distributors led by Dakota Drug (667 orders) and DMS Pharmaceutical Group (217).
That is a procurement architecture with one artery. It is efficient, and it is also the reason a single prime-vendor contract transition, dispute, or disruption would be visible in this data within days — across every drug the military health system buys, not just this class.
The same search across the rest of the Crucible spine — 150+ procurement sources covering Europe, Latin America, the Gulf, and beyond — finds just 98 public awards naming a GLP-1 drug in 2025, across ten countries. The comparison is not a consumption estimate: most European health systems buy medicines through national reimbursement and pharmacy channels that never touch a public tender. But it is a visibility fact, and it cuts the other way to the usual assumption. American federal transparency rules turn the world's most-watched drug launch into open micro-data, while Europe's purchases of the same drugs — Novo Nordisk's home market among them — happen almost entirely outside the public procurement record.
Universe: Valan Crucible award spine, 75,931,039 public awards, queried 10 July 2026. US federal rows derive from USAspending line-item records. GLP-1 orders were identified by exact keyword match over award titles and descriptions against an explicit molecule and brand list: semaglutide, tirzepatide, dulaglutide, liraglutide, exenatide, lixisenatide, and their marketed brand names (Ozempic, Wegovy, Rybelsus, Mounjaro, Zepbound, Trulicity, Victoza, Saxenda, Byetta, Bydureon, Adlyxin), plus the class terms GLP-1/GLP1. No similarity or inferred matching was used.
Grain: one row per delivery order — typically a single product line such as "OZEMPIC 2 MG/DOSE (8 MG/3 ML) 3ML". Values are gross order values at pharmacy prime-vendor level; they do not reflect confidential manufacturer rebates, and are not a net-spend estimate.
Diabetes vs weight-loss split: orders are classified by the brand's FDA-approved indication — Wegovy, Zepbound, and Saxenda as obesity-only; Ozempic, Rybelsus, Mounjaro, Trulicity, Victoza, Byetta, and Bydureon as diabetes-approved. This measures approved indication, not each patient's diagnosis; off-label prescribing of a diabetes brand for weight management is not captured, making the obesity share a conservative lower bound.
Universe reconciliation: the 92,048 orders are those whose title or description names a specific GLP-1 molecule or marketed brand. A small number of research and consulting contracts — four identified, placed by NIH and HHS — reference the drug class or a molecule name without being pharmacy purchases (for example, an NIH GLP-1 statistical-analysis order and a tirzepatide-honoraria contract); these are excluded, which is why the annual buckets and per-molecule counts reconcile exactly to 92,048 rather than to a slightly larger keyword-match total.
Why the record stops at September 2025: this dataset was queried on 10 July 2026, and civilian-agency orders in it extend through July 2026 — but the Department of Defense line-item stream lags the civilian stream by roughly three quarters. DoD rows dated 2026 do appear in the data, only in the low dozens, confirming the sparseness is source-side reporting lag rather than a collection gap. September 2025 is therefore the last complete month of military pharmacy data available, and every 2025 total in this piece is a nine-month (January–September) figure, labelled as such throughout.
Buyer attribution: 99.99% of matched orders (92,042 of 92,048) are Department of Defense; the remainder are HHS and DLA. Non-US comparison covers public tender and award sources only and is presented as a visibility observation, not a consumption comparison.
Sources: USAspending.gov (US federal), TED (EU), and 150+ national procurement systems. All open, official primary sources.
For systematic and event-driven strategies, the point is not that the military buys weight-loss drugs. It is that an official, public, order-level demand record exists for the defining pharmaceutical franchise battle of the decade — updated continuously, at product-and-dose granularity, from a buyer whose pharmaceutical-classified orders in this record totalled $4.7 billion in 2024 alone — and that it tracked the semaglutide-tirzepatide share shift quarter by quarter, in a channel where consumer marketing does not reach.
The same record prices the generational decay of Trulicity, times the death of the first-generation molecules, and exposes a 98.4% single-distributor concentration in the military pharmaceutical supply chain. None of it required a survey, a panel, or an estimate. It required reading 75 million awards one line at a time.
The pens are counted. Someone just has to count them.
New research from Valan's 75M-award dataset, delivered as it publishes. No noise.