55 articles · Economics & Procurement · page 1 of 3
Articles
Week of 5 October 2026
Rural health transformation money runs on three clocks, and only two of them come with funding
In October 2026 states hurried to commit their first-year Rural Health Transformation money. For rural providers, the deadline that matters most comes later, when the grants end and the technology they bought has to pay its own way.
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Paused, not repealed: what CMMC’s suspension left defense contractors paying for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 1 June 2026
For a small adviser, Regulation S-P compliance is bought before the breach
The amended Regulation S-P reached smaller advisers and broker-dealers on June 3, 2026, and most had no in-house incident team. For them, compliance means buying in advance: people to respond, the evidence to decide, and the means to notify clients.
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 2 February 2026
Vendors repriced in a day, contracts run for years: the buyer’s side of the software selloff
In February, investors dumped software stocks on fears that AI agents would upend the business. Buyers in banks, hospitals and agencies faced a slower-moving problem: contracts priced per human user, locked for years, closed to automation and hard to exit.
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 24 November 2025
SitusAMC turned a mid-tier mortgage vendor into a top-tier bank exposure
A breach at SitusAMC, a real estate finance services firm few people had heard of, reached some of the largest U.S. banks. Vendor rankings built on spend and operational importance had missed a company holding sensitive data for many institutions at once.
Week of 18 August 2025
How a fee question pulled open banking off the rulebook and onto the rate card
By asking whether banks may charge for customer data access, the CFPB’s August 2025 notice moved open banking’s rules from regulation into contracts. Big banks could set prices, smaller ones would inherit them through vendors, and fintechs would redesign around them.
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 26 May 2025
How ConnectWise’s breach tested small practices’ business associate agreements
In May 2025 a nation-state intrusion hit ConnectWise, a maker of remote access software that sits two contracts away from most physician practices. Their IT services and business associate agreements are their only real controls, and most say too little.
Week of 24 February 2025
The House budget vote signaled Medicaid churn, a cost hospitals pay at the front desk
A narrow February 2025 House vote set Medicaid on the path to big changes. Beyond lost revenue, more frequent eligibility checks and work requirements would make it costlier to know who is covered, at the front desk, in enrollment help and in billing.
Week of 13 January 2025
DORA’s register of information made every bank a data supplier to EU oversight of its vendors
DORA’s register of technology suppliers looked like paperwork. In fact it was a dataset supervisors would pool to spot concentration and pick critical providers, and its quality depended on three data problems most vendor programs had never solved: identity, dependency and depth.
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 25 November 2024
Blue Yonder put process-running vendors at the top of the risk register
A ransomware attack on Blue Yonder left baristas and warehouse staff waiting on schedules and pay, and exposed a blind spot. Most vendor checks ask who holds your data. The better question is whose failure would stop your work.
Week of 30 September 2024
Saline exposed the risk that hides in a hospital’s cheapest line items
One flooded Baxter plant put IV fluids on ration across the country. Cheap essentials end up made in very few places because low prices reward scale, so hospitals should manage them by how critical they are to care, using four practical levers.
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 10 June 2024
Why banking-as-a-service margins never covered the cost of knowing whose money it was
The Fed’s order against Evolve exposed a mismatch built into banking-as-a-service. Sponsor banks earned more as balances grew, but the cost of reconciliation, oversight and partner failure grew with every new program. Banks that priced only the revenue ended up carrying the costs.
Week of 3 June 2024
Synnovis put a price on pathology consolidation that no contract carried
Ransomware at Synnovis showed south-east London what consolidating pathology really costs. Pooling a region’s labs into one partner saves money every year and concentrates a rare, very large loss. The business case counted the savings. No contract, budget or insurance policy carried the loss.
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.