Selling in September: Check the Use-By Date

Every appropriated dollar shows up with a use-by date stamped on the carton.

That's not me being cute. It's how the accounts actually work. Congress doesn't hand the Department one big pile of cash; it stocks a refrigerator, and everything in it is dated. Operation and Maintenance money — Military Personnel too — is milk: good for one year, then done. RDT&E is cheese, keeps for two. Procurement is canned goods, three years on the shelf. Shipbuilding and military construction sit in the deep freezer at five. The comptroller crowd calls these the "colors of money." Fine. But shelf life is the better frame, because shelf life is the thing that explains September.

Here's the catch: the dates get printed as if the groceries arrived on October 1. Whether or not they did.

This year, they very much did not.

Walk the FY26 timeline with me. October 1, 2025: the fiscal year opens with no appropriation and the longest shutdown on record. Mid-November: a CR that drips small dollars into pre-existing programs through the end of January. Then, on February 3, 2026, the full-year defense appropriation finally lands — north of $838 billion of it, including roughly $294 billion in one-year O&M.

The milk arrived in February. The use-by date is still September 30.

Do the math. A planning-and-obligation year that's supposed to run twelve months got compressed to about eight. Every fiscal year ends in a sprint — I've written before about the summertime bonfire of O&M dollars — but this year the starting gun went off a third of the way down the track.

Same finish line, though.

So yes, the September money is real. Probably more real than usual.

Now, before anyone in industry starts licking their chops about "use it or lose it," let's be real about who's on the other side of the table. The contracting officer obligating hard against the September 30 wall isn't being wasteful, and she isn't being reckless. She's responding rationally to the incentive we built for her: a dollar left unobligated on October 1 becomes Exhibit A in next year's argument that her office never needed it in the first place. The people are fine. The incentive is the problem.

Which brings us to the sellers. This is a big fridge to boil, so I'll keep it to three things.

First, know which carton your customer is holding. Ask them. Straight up, in the meeting: what color is the money, and what year is it? Expiring O&M is what fuels the year-end clean-out. And check the back of the fridge — FY24 procurement dollars hit their three-year date this September 30 too. A BD conversation that doesn't know the color and the vintage of the customer's money isn't a strategy. It's a guess.

Second, be ready-to-eat. Nobody standing in front of an open refrigerator at 11:45pm on September 30 is starting a recipe. If your offering needs a requirements definition, a novel contracting approach, and three months of negotiation, you are not year-end food. What moves in September: a clean quote, an existing vehicle, a scoped deliverable, a period of performance that survives scrutiny. And read the fine print on the carton. The bona fide needs rule — 31 U.S.C. 1502, for those keeping score at home — says a fiscal year's money buys that fiscal year's needs. Walking in with a pitch to stockpile next year's requirements doesn't help your customer, it hands them an audit finding. Help them document a real FY26 need or don't take the meeting.

Third, don't confuse the clean-out with a relationship. The same customer swiping hard in September will be broke in October. The Senate already passed a stopgap for the new fiscal year — 90 to 6, on August 8, running to December 11 — while the House carried its own shorter version before recess, and the two get sorted out in September. However that lands, October opens as another drip: prior-year levels, no new starts. The point of a September win was never the revenue. When the customer finally gets real money, in December or February or whenever the truck shows up, you want to be a line item they already know instead of a vendor they once met.

One more practitioner note, on leftovers. Expired money isn't gone, exactly. It sits in the expired account for five years, where it can pay for adjustments to work already on contract but can't start anything new. Then it's canceled, and the fridge gets emptied for real. Translation: in-scope mods, yes. New scope dressed up as a mod, no... that one has ended careers.

Could we design this better? Sure. If the groceries keep showing up in February, there's a fair argument the carton shouldn't say October. But I'm not holding my breath for fiscal law reform, and neither should you.

Read the dates. Sell what's ready to eat. And be in the fridge before the clean-out starts — the door slams at midnight on the 30th, and this year the whole meal is getting cooked in half the time.