SAM.gov Registration in 2026: What’s Changed and What Trips Up New Contractors
The federal government awards more than $650 billion in contracts every year. A full 23% of that spending goes to small businesses through set-aside programs. To access any of it, your firm needs one thing first: an active SAM.gov registration. SAM.gov, the System for Award Management, is the government’s central database for contractors. No active registration means no contract […]
CMMC, AI, and Cleared Hiring: The Three Pressures Reshaping GovCon in 2026
If you run a defense contracting firm right now, the environment has gotten objectively harder in the past twelve months. Compliance demands have multiplied; the talent you need is either unavailable or stuck in a clearance backlog, and the AI tools your team adopted to save time may have quietly created a new class of regulatory exposure. […]
Stop Fighting for Scraps: 7 High-Demand Industries for Your First GovCon Win
Many beginners in federal contracting fail not because of a lack of effort, but because they choose industries that are too competitive, too slow, or require past performance; they simply don’t have it yet. Success is about strategy, which means positioning your business where demand is high, but the competition is manageable. By focusing on these seven accessible […]
CMMC Rev 3 Compliance in 2026: What Defense Contractors Must Know Before It’s Too Late
If you hold a DoD contract or want one, your cybersecurity posture is now a legal requirement, not a checkbox to exercise. CMMC Rev 3 compliance is live. The phased rollout is already in motion, and November 2026 is the date most contractors handling Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) will stop being able to self-certify. After that, you’ll need a third-party […]
Federal Contractor Alert: 9 GovCon Changes in 2025-2026 You Cannot Afford to Ignore
If you’re a federal contractor right now, prime or sub, large or small, 8(a), SDVOSB, WOSB – 2025 was not a routine year. The procurement landscape didn’t just shift. It got rebuilt. And the pace hasn’t slowed going into 2026. This isn’t a policy memo. It’s a working checklist of some of the developments that are actively affecting how contractors bid, […]
The Funding Is Back. The Real Bottleneck Isn’t Contracts – It’s Cleared Talent.
After 76 days of budget uncertainty, the freeze has lifted. DHS is funded through September. ICE and CBP now have a combined $70 billion modernization runway. Contracting officers are moving fast, and agencies that had programs on hold are restarting them simultaneously. For a lot of contractors, this feels like the moment they’ve been waiting for. Proposals that stalled are back in play. […]
The SBIR Program Is Back: 4 Key Changes Every Small Business Must Know in 2026
After six long months of silence, the SBIR program is officially back. On April 13, 2026, President Trump signed the Small Business Innovation and Economic Security Act into law, ending the longest freeze in the program’s 43-year history and kicking off a brand-new 5-year runway through September 30, 2031. If you run a small tech […]
Why Your GovCon Firm Can’t Find Cleared Talent and How to Fix It
The Cleared Talent Crisis Isn’t Temporary In the government contracting (GovCon) space, one challenge continues to surface across programs, agencies, and contract vehicles: the shortage of cleared talent. While this issue is widely acknowledged, it is often misunderstood and more importantly, poorly addressed. This is not temporary market fluctuation. It is a structural constraint that directly impacts delivery timelines, […]