Every federal employee knows the ritual. It’s late September. Program managers are sprinting unspent balances to the contracting office. Vendors are quoting “September pricing” with a straight face, and somewhere a chief financial officer is watching millions of dollars get obligated in 72 hours — not because the timing is right, but because the money dies at midnight on the 30th.
That ritual is the single largest recurring transfer of negotiating leverage from the taxpayer to the vendor community. It happens every year, at every agency, on a schedule every sales rep in America has memorized. Earlier this year, an article in the Washington Post mentioned: the “use or lose” syndrome “places government negotiators in a poor bargaining posture.” Wait, that wasn’t an article from 2026, it was from 1980.
On June 10, 2026, that ritual died for two agencies, but almost nobody noticed. While most coverage of the Secure America Act has focused on enforcement scale and political implications, the procurement story has gone largely unexamined. Buried in five pages of statutory text is a structural shift in federal buying power that acquisition professionals should be studying closely. The bill provides roughly $69.5 billion across the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and related DHS funding that remains available until Sept. 30, 2029. Set aside the immigration politics for a moment; in practical buying terms, this is not just more money. It is patient money.
What does that mean for the people who actually buy things in government?
Short answer: everything.
Leverage is alternatives multiplied by time
Here’s what two decades on every side of the federal table taught me — as an industry analyst, as a DHS executive, as a U.S. Digital Service (USDS) alum and acquisition strategist at the White House, and as a seller who knows exactly how vendor compensation plans work:
Every software company runs on a clock. Quota quarters. Fiscal year-ends. Discount approval thresholds that loosen as the deadline approaches. The reps know our calendar cold — and until June 10, the government’s calendar always expired first. When your money dies Sept. 30 and the vendor’s quarter closes in November, guess who blinks.
Patient money flips the table. For the first time, two federal buyers can let a vendor’s quarter-end arrive before their own. They can offer what commercial enterprise buyers trade for 25% to 40% discounts: committed term and committed volume, with the funds actually in hand to back the commitment. They can say “we’ll walk and re-compete” — and mean it, because the money will still be there when the competition concludes.
And they can demand the terms that matter at award — the only moment leverage truly exists:
- Data portability in open formats at no cost.
- Government control or sufficient rights to mission data, schemas, configurations, workflows, prompts, integration logic and export artifacts.
- No silent renewals or price escalators without a fresh option exercise, competition or price-reasonableness determination.
- Machine-readable pricing, consumption and utilization disclosure.
Every clause skipped at award becomes a hostage negotiation at renewal. I have the scar tissue to prove it — in three years of running buyer-side leverage plays, my teams documented roughly $270 million in savings and avoidance, including $70 million at one financial regulator and $200 million avoided on a single General Services Administration blanket purchase agreement. Every dollar of it was won with an expiring clock working against us.
I wrote in another publication back in September 2017 that ending use-it-or-lose-it could finally give federal IT leaders the flexibility of their private-sector counterparts. The Modernizing Government Technology (MGT) Act delivered that idea in $100 million tranches. This delivers it at $69.5 billion scale — through the side door, in a bill almost no one read as procurement policy. The argument isn’t new — I made a version of it in 2018. What’s new is that the money is finally real.
This is not a product argument or a comment on any current procurement. It is an argument about method.
The fork in the road
Now the honest part, because money without method spins backward.
We have a preview of the default path. The American Immigration Council reported that a similar $10 billion DHS general fund from last year’s reconciliation law had already been nearly 86% spent by April 2026 — less than a year after enactment. And the recent pattern in federal artificial intelligence buying includes sole-source justifications that cite the incumbent’s accumulated data gravity as the very reason competition is impossible. Read that again: The lock-in has become the legal argument for more lock-in.
So there are two versions of 2029. In one, the agencies spent fast into the gravity wells, and the Congress seated that year — whoever controls it — inherits enforcement infrastructure it cannot redirect, re-compete or fully audit.
In the other, somebody installed discipline in the first few quarters: inventoried the vendor base and scored the lock-in before obligating a dollar, built the negotiation calendar around vendor fiscal years instead of the government’s, wrote a terms floor into every solicitation and trained the contracting workforce to run the play at scale.
The difference between those two futures isn’t money or authority. Both are now in hand. The difference is method — and the runway to install it is measured in months.
Interestingly, this opportunity arrives as the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) itself is undergoing its most significant modernization in decades. The first wave of proposed rules from the Revolutionary FAR Overhaul focuses on reducing unnecessary clauses, moving away from incorporation by reference and streamlining prescriptions — changes that should make it easier for agencies to negotiate clean, tailored terms rather than defaulting to layers of standard boilerplate.
Annual Office of Management and Budget apportionment of multi-year funds to reserve amounts for future fiscal years is the standard and expected mechanism for managing large, multi-year appropriations. When used deliberately, it gives agencies the ability to pace obligations strategically rather than forcing rushed decisions at artificial year-end cliffs.
In the next 180 days, agencies that want to capture this leverage instead of defaulting to speed must do three things:
- Stand up a cross-functional leverage cell. Bring contracting, program, legal and data together to map every major existing contract, option year and planned obligation against vendor fiscal calendars before any new money moves.
- Publish and enforce a “terms floor.” Require data portability in open formats at no cost; government control or sufficient rights to mission data, schemas, configurations, workflows, prompts, integration logic and export artifacts; machine-readable pricing, consumption and utilization disclosure; and no silent renewals or price escalators without a fresh option exercise, competition or price-reasonableness determination.
- Run a rapid lock-in risk inventory. Data gravity is what happens when years of agency data, workflows, integrations, and operational habits settle into one platform and begin pulling future decisions toward that vendor. Switching costs are the practical barriers to leaving: migration, integration, retraining, security reauthorizations, downtime risk, and the loss of negotiating leverage once no realistic alternative remains. Score the data gravity and switching costs of the top 20–30 current vendors and platforms before major obligations are executed.
The AI acceptance gate
One more thing the bill quietly did: Section 103(c) defines “autonomous” capabilities in statute and prohibits buying border surveillance towers that haven’t been tested and accepted against that standard. Congress just wrote a performance acceptance gate for AI into appropriations law. Every acquisition professional in government should read that clause twice — and then ask why we would hold a tower to a clearer autonomy acceptance standard than the software recommending, routing, prioritizing or shaping operational decisions across the rest of the enterprise.
The report card comes due in 2029
To the acquisition workforce at CBP and ICE — and everyone else watching: the craft this community built under MGT and Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) constraints, the working capital mechanics, the repayment business cases, the leverage discipline — all of that was the rehearsal. This is the performance.
The government just became, for one brief window, what it has always claimed to be: the largest and most patient buyer on the planet. We are about to find out whether it can negotiate like one.
The opportunity is open. What will you actually do in the first 180 days?
Jeremy Wilcox has spent 25 years on every side of the federal technology table — Forrester executive lead, DHS executive, USDS alum and acquisition strategist in the White House, and enterprise technology seller, currently leading federal strategic solutions for federal law enforcement at C3 AI. Views are his own.
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