The Layer a Shutdown Takes Out First

Thursday starts FY2027 with the lights on. The President signed the continuing resolution on September 2, and it funds all twelve bills from October 1 through December 11, so nobody at your desk is drafting stop-work language this week.

Last year's opening was the other kind. Appropriations lapsed at midnight on October 1, 2025 and stayed lapsed 42 days, until the bill that reopened the government was signed on November 12.

So we went and measured what those six weeks did to the front of the pipeline. The answer is narrower than the coverage was, and it is not where most people looked.

The solicitations went out anyway

Army, Navy and Air Force contracting offices posted 996 solicitation notices to SAM in October 2025.

October 2024 was 1,029. October 2023 was 1,052.

That is a 3.2% gap against last year. Count only first postings, dropping the amendment re-postings that make up roughly half of any month's solicitation records, and it widens to 9.0%, or 507 against 557.

Neither number describes a department that stopped buying.

November is where the solicitation layer finally gave: 912 against 1,117, first postings down 21.3%.

Where it actually landed

Sources sought is the layer that moved, and it moved on day one (chart below).

The military departments posted 369 sources sought notices in October 2025 and 363 in November.

The two prior Octobers ran 685 and 601. The two prior Novembers ran 695 and 702.

First postings only, the cleanest read: 258 in October against 474, down 45.6%.

So the same offices that kept pushing solicitations out the door had almost entirely stopped opening new requirements.

Well, that ordering makes sense once you look at where the work already sits. A solicitation on the street in September carries a contracting officer, a PWS, a funded requirement and a closing date, and excepted staff finish what is already obligated.

Market research on a requirement with no fiscal year attached to it yet is the first thing that falls off a furloughed desk.

The year never made it up

Volume came back fast. January 2026 ran 762 against 740 the prior January, the first month to clear its own comparison.

Fast is not the same as whole. FY2026 closed with 8,835 sources sought notices against 10,229 in FY2025 and 9,914 in FY2024, with ten of twelve months below the prior year.

The two lapse months account for 648 of that 1,394-notice shortfall. Roughly 46% of the gap opened in six weeks, and the remaining ten and a half months never closed it.

To be fair, September 2026 is a partial month in this pull, swept on the 28th, so the FY2026 total is a floor.

What to do with it in December

The CR runs 72 days. Three things follow:

October is not your exposure this year. The notices that seed your FY2028 captures are going out on schedule right now, and that is the window to be reading them.
If December 12 arrives without an appropriation, watch the sources sought count rather than the RFP count. The solicitation layer lagged by a full month last time, so an RFP census taken in week one of a lapse reads clean and tells you nothing.
A December lapse would land on a heavier stretch than October did. FY2025 ran 740, 881 and 1,067 across January through March; FY2024 ran 817, 902 and 925. There is more market research in that window to lose.

Final Thoughts

None of this settles whether the lapse was worth it. It does say where the damage lands, which is on the requirements nobody had gotten around to writing down yet.

Those are invisible while it is happening. Nothing slips, nothing protests, no incumbent loses anything.

They show up eleven months later as a thin slate, and by then the reason is hard to see.

If the December date passes without a bill, count the notices that never post. That number is your pipeline, about a year out.

Thanks for reading.