If you’re a technology solutions provider, we hope you had a great summer and managed to squeeze in some time off, because the busy season is here, and September has already been a frenzy.

Work is already a top source of stress for many Americans, but right now government procurement teams face enormous pressure as they rush to negotiate and award contracts while ensuring regulatory compliance before the federal fiscal year ends on September 30^th.

It’s that time again, when agencies rush to spend their remaining year-end budget before the September 30^th “use it or lose it” deadline. One-third of federal budget dollars are spent in the last quarter of the year, often in a wasteful manner. But for those in the field of digital design – there are many opportunities to make value-based investments using taxpayer dollars before it’s too late.

1. Training

This week we sat down with DLT Senior Director of Program Management, Steve Wells, to discuss how DLT's contract expertise can be beneficial to its technology company clients and public sector customers, particularly as we approach the end of the Federal Fiscal Year. We also discussed Steve's military career, of which he just celebrated a major milestone.

Interviewer: Hi Steve, thanks for sitting down with us today. To start, why don’t you tell us a little bit about what you do at DLT.

An irony of late appropriations – as the federal government experienced for the umpteenth time in fiscal 2018 – is that rather than rush to spend, your federal customers are actually spending at rates below what they’re authorized to spend. That makes it harder to maximize the year-end spending blitz.

It takes some doing, but if you’ve got the fortitude to plow through reports from the Bureau of the Fiscal Services and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), it’s possible to discern that agencies simply might not have the time and manpower to execute on every program.

The 2018 federal busy season, or FFYE, is upon us. With almost one-third of agency dollars being awarded during the last quarter of the fiscal year, this is peak buying season and the busiest time of year for federal procurement officers.

If you’re wondering where to spend your federal fiscal year-end dollars, no doubt cybersecurity is top of mind. With threats increasing and constantly evolving, protecting federal systems, networks, and data has never been more important.

But this year, there’s a new imperative for federal CIOs – the Presidential Executive Order on Strengthening the Cybersecurity of Federal Networks and Critical Infrastructure.

Federal fiscal year-end (FFYE) is a harried time for the federal procurement system. As agencies hustle to spend their “use-it-or-lose-it” budgets, contracting officers are under peak pressure to obtain maximum value for the money they spend on property and services, ensure compliance with statutory and regulatory requirements in awarding contracts, and so on.

Federal fiscal year-end is the busiest season for government IT spending. With only a few weeks left to spend the $3.8 trillion apportioned in Uncle Sam’s 2016 budget, the pressure is on to spend prudently and procure efficiently.

But with growing media and public concern that year-end spending is wasteful, how can your agency make smart IT investments of tax payer dollars come September 30?