Government · Economics & Procurement
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17 articles · Government · Economics & Procurement
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Week of 28 September 2026
Paused, not repealed: what CMMC’s suspension left defense contractors paying for
Six weeks before CMMC third-party certification was due to start, it sat suspended with no new date. Defense contractors setting budgets had to sort security spending into what was still owed, what could wait and what had changed price.
Week of 17 August 2026
The dollar AI deals ended in a meter, and meters need ceilings
For a year, federal agencies got leading AI assistants for about a dollar. Six weeks before those deals expired, nobody knew what came next. Pay-as-you-go pricing was the likely answer, and it turns a procurement question into a budgeting one.
Week of 23 February 2026
What a supply chain label on a U.S. AI vendor asked of agencies and contractors
As the administration moved to exclude Anthropic, agencies and contractors could not wait for the courts. The organizations that coped best asked three calm questions in order: which legal instrument applied, whom and which contracts it reached, and which uses it covered.
Week of 22 December 2025
Legal to fly, hard to replace: the FCC drone listing and public-safety fleets
The FCC’s December 22 action grounded no police or fire drone. It closed the door on new foreign-made models, turning every agency drone program into a question of spare parts, software support and who pays for the next fleet.
Week of 4 August 2025
Cheap to license, slow to permit: federal AI’s bottleneck moved to the CISO’s desk
GSA’s August 2025 deals made leading AI tools nearly free for federal agencies. A $1 price grants none of the three permissions that decide real use: a security sign-off, a ruling on what data may go in, and an owner for records and oversight.
Week of 9 December 2024
In the RIBridges breach, Rhode Island owned the outage and its vendor owned the evidence
Attackers breached Rhode Island’s vendor-run benefits system, and the public held the state accountable while the vendor held the systems, logs and investigation. The fix is a contract that settles visibility, decisions, costs and exit before anything goes wrong.
Week of 17 June 2024
Old ban, new deadline: Kaspersky’s exit reached the governments Washington’s 2017 order never covered
Federal agencies dropped Kaspersky years ago. The June 2024 Commerce decision reached counties, school districts, utilities and contractors, with a hard deadline. It showed that replacing a security product is a procurement project with three costs most public budgets had never estimated.
Week of 1 April 2024
Agencies buy a cloud provider’s security culture whether or not the contract mentions it
A federal review board blamed the 2023 Exchange Online intrusion on Microsoft’s security culture. No agency can audit a culture, but the report showed three places it leaves evidence a buyer can demand: secrets, disclosure and defaults.
Week of 29 May 2023
Flat caps, rising subscriptions: how the debt deal squeezed federal IT from the inside
The 2023 debt deal held nondefense spending roughly flat for two years. Federal IT budgets did not shrink evenly: subscriptions and cloud bills grew on their own, modernization slipped by default, and technical staff thinned through attrition. Each needed its own control.
Week of 27 March 2023
Why the spyware order put the burden on acquisition staff
Executive Order 14093 did not ban commercial spyware. It barred agencies from using tools that threatened US security or had been misused abroad, which meant the policy would stand or fall on the unglamorous work of agency lawyers, security staff and contracting officers.
Week of 19 December 2022
The quantum law asked for a price tag agencies could only get from their vendors
A December 2022 law asked OMB to tell Congress what protecting federal systems from future quantum computers would cost. Most of that cost sat in products agencies did not build, so an honest answer depended on vendor roadmaps, contracts and replacement cycles.
Week of 21 November 2022
Banned from the market, still on the wall: the FCC’s equipment order and the installed base
In November 2022 the FCC stopped approving new equipment from Huawei and ZTE, and security gear from Hikvision, Dahua and Hytera. It left installed devices alone, so the real work moved to each agency’s own inventory.
Week of 12 September 2022
M-22-18 asked producers to sign; agencies first had to know who they were
In 2022 the White House told software makers selling to federal agencies to sign their names to how they build it. The form got the headlines. The lasting work was knowing who made your software, and deciding what their promises were worth.
Week of 15 November 2021
A cyber grant with a rising match is a sustainment test
The infrastructure law’s $1 billion cybersecurity grant came with a local share that rose every year. That forced states and localities to decide early what they would keep paying for once the federal money stopped.
Week of 4 October 2021
Why a security attestation to government now carries fraud risk
In October 2021 the Justice Department said it would use a fraud law against contractors and grantees whose security promises outran their practice. Overnight, a signature on a security form became a personal and financial risk for whoever signed it.
Week of 8 March 2021
One-time money, recurring bills: the Rescue Plan’s technology hangover
The American Rescue Plan handed state and local governments $350 billion of flexible, temporary money. Where it paid for technology subscriptions, the risk hid in three places: the shape of the funds, the shape of the costs, and contracts signed in a hurry.
Week of 30 November 2020
Congress regulated connected devices by deciding what agencies may buy
The IoT Cybersecurity Improvement Act set no rules for device makers. Instead it set rules for one very large customer, the federal government, pushed security duties onto its contractors, and exposed an old problem: you cannot secure devices you do not know you own.