USFCR Blog

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Hurricane Isaias made landfall near Destin, Florida, on October 9, 2026, as a Category 2 storm, and recovery is still in the emergency stage. Federal emergency declarations for parts of Florida, Alabama, and Georgia currently fund only emergency protective measures. That means most contractor work right now runs through counties, cities, and established prime contractors. An active SAM.gov registration with a Disaster Response Registry listing is the first step toward getting involved.

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In commercial business, overhead is a private number folded into your price, and customers judge only the price. In government contracting, overhead becomes a structured, visible rate: indirect costs are grouped into defined pools, applied through calculated rates, and, on cost-type work, billed provisionally and settled against actuals. The difference shapes how you price, what your accounting system must do, and how buyers judge whether your numbers are realistic.

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Government buyers care about incurred cost submissions because on cost-reimbursement and time-and-materials contracts, the government pays a contractor's actual allowable costs, and the annual submission is how those costs get verified and settled. Commercial buyers rarely look inside a supplier's books, while a federal buyer paying actual costs must. The submission is due within six months of the contractor's fiscal year end, and being ready for it signals readiness for cost-type work.

Updated October 9, 2026, at 3:00 p.m. EDT (2:00 p.m. CDT) with the latest National Hurricane Center forecast and emergency declaration status.

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If you want to help with recovery work after Hurricane Isaias, confirm your SAM registration is active and join the Disaster Response Registry now. Florida has asked for a federal emergency declaration, but none had been approved as of Friday afternoon, and the federal preference for local businesses only applies once one covers your county. The earliest work moves quickly, so getting ready now makes sure buyers can find you.

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The biggest change to procurement forecasting heading into FY2027 is standardization, not full consolidation. In November 2024, OMB directed agencies to standardize forecast data and centralize it on GSA's Forecast of Contracting Opportunities (FCO) tool, with alignment due by the end of Q3 FY2026. That deadline has passed, but adoption remains uneven. Treat the FCO tool as a starting point for FY2027 research, not the only stop.

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May's Small Business Month, anchored by National Small Business Week on May 3 through 9, spotlighted free resources that remain available all year, from SBA training to no-cost counseling networks. The months that follow are when event connections either become pipeline or fade, which makes now the time to revisit those resources, follow up with the people you met, and plan your fall networking calendar.

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Relationships can help you get noticed before a contract is competed, but they won't decide who wins it. Once a solicitation is out, federal agencies have to score every proposal against the exact criteria they published in that document. So the strongest proposal usually beats the strongest relationship, not the other way around. The practical move is to build visibility and connections before a solicitation drops, then win the actual competition with a proposal built around exactly what the agency said it would judge.

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Building an FY2027 pursuit team means assigning, before the year's opportunities arrive, who covers each part of winning federal work, from finding and qualifying opportunities to writing proposals, keeping compliance current, and delivering after award. For most small contractors, that team blends internal roles, teaming partners, and outside support, and naming who owns each job is what keeps pursuits from stalling against a deadline.

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This week's nor'easter brought coastal flooding from Virginia to Massachusetts, and both New Jersey and New York declared states of emergency. Most immediate response work goes to contractors that hold emergency contracts, so small businesses usually get in by subcontracting now and competing for recovery work later. Hurricane Polo weakened from a Category 5 to a Category 3 hurricane before approaching Mexico's Baja California peninsula, well south of the U.S. border, though its moisture brought flash flood watches to parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Texas. Confirm your SAM registration is active and opt into the Disaster Response Registry.

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CPARS still uses the five-point adjectival scale. The negative-events-only model that circulated widely in late 2025 was proposed in both chambers of the FY2026 defense authorization but was dropped before the bill was signed on December 18, 2025. What did change is where past performance gets used. Under the FAR overhaul, evaluations on contracts awarded on or after April 1, 2026 can inform decisions across the full contract lifecycle, not just source selection.