My 2 cents. The new contractor is pretty rough around the edges, but the number of awards was largely linked to an increase of cost per award (maybe some "startup"costs like building a website, but hopefully not graft).
The mid-March emails were a complete failure: with some actual awardees not receiving them, and revealed a lot of poor management. I think it was meant to be a nice status update, but ended up making their job a lot harder (probably led to a big spike in phone calls afterwards). I could be wrong, but I'd bet they just don't say anything until the awards are announced this year.
Thoughts?