Fixed-price delivery. Working systems. No discovery phase.
Government & Public Sector
What the compliance landscape actually demands.
Federal technology procurement operates under a framework defined by FISMA, FedRAMP, and the Federal Acquisition Regulations — with agency-specific requirements that vary by mission classification and data sensitivity. FISMA requires federal agencies to implement information security programs satisfying NIST SP 800-53 controls. FedRAMP provides a standardized approach to security authorization for cloud services: a cloud vendor must achieve FedRAMP authorization before federal agencies can use their services. The FedRAMP Moderate baseline requires 323 controls; the High baseline requires 421 controls. The average time to achieve FedRAMP Moderate authorization has historically been 12–18 months — but organizations that architect compliance from the start can compress this timeline because they are producing authorization evidence during the build, not reconstructing it after the fact. CMMC 2.0 adds cybersecurity maturity requirements for DoD contractors — Level 2 requires implementation of all 110 NIST SP 800-171 controls and third-party assessment by a C3PAO. StateRAMP provides a FedRAMP-aligned framework for state government cloud authorizations. CJIS compliance is mandatory for any system handling Criminal Justice Information, with more prescriptive authentication, encryption, and access control requirements than most general IT security frameworks. Executive Order 13960 and subsequent AI governance directives create requirements for federal AI systems that map to NIST AI RMF categories — with increasing state legislation adopting the same framework.
The Beltway Bandit delivery model is collapsing under DOGE scrutiny — and agencies that have relied on cost-plus consulting contracts to build technology are discovering that their systems don't work.
The Beltway Bandit model is collapsing. $65B in consultant contracts under DOGE review. Pentagon cancelled $5.1B in contracts with Accenture, Deloitte, and Booz Allen. Government needs lean, outcome-focused technology partners who deliver working systems at fixed prices — not cost-plus billing pyramids.
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The federal technology procurement environment has shifted materially following post-DOGE budget scrutiny. The historical model — award a large IDIQ contract, deploy hundreds of consultants, spend 18 months in discovery and requirements gathering before writing a line of code — is no longer politically viable in an environment where $65B in consultant contracts are under review and the Pentagon has cancelled $5.1B in contracts with Accenture, Deloitte, and Booz Allen. Agencies that have modernized fastest have the most defensible budget positions, because they can demonstrate working systems rather than assessment documents. The procurement environment now favors fixed-price contracts with working system deliverables over time-and-materials engagements with deliverables measured in documents. State and local government technology operates under a different but increasingly demanding regulatory overlay: StateRAMP adoption is growing, CJIS compliance is mandatory for law enforcement technology, and NIST AI RMF is being adopted by state AI governance legislation in California, Colorado, Illinois, and others. The vendors who built their government practices on cost-plus billing pyramids are losing the market to teams that deliver working systems at fixed prices with compliance built in from the first architecture decision.
How We Approach Government & Public Sector
The Algorithm approaches government engagements with fixed-price delivery and compliance-native architecture as non-negotiable constraints. FedRAMP authorization begins at the architecture phase: NIST SP 800-53 control families are mapped to infrastructure decisions, system security plan documentation is produced during the build, and the 3PAO assessment package is assembled from evidence generated during system development rather than created retroactively. This approach compresses authorization timelines because every piece of evidence the 3PAO needs already exists in documented form. CMMC 2.0 Level 2 compliance is implemented as a byproduct of building systems with NIST SP 800-171 controls fully implemented — not a separate compliance exercise bolted on after the build. CJIS compliance for law enforcement systems includes the authentication, audit logging, and access control implementations the CJIS Security Policy requires, with documented evidence for the CJIS Systems Officer audit. The AI systems we deliver for federal and state agencies are documented against NIST AI RMF — with the model documentation, bias testing, and monitoring infrastructure that agency AI governance review boards require. Delivery is fixed-price with working systems as the deliverable. Not roadmaps. Not assessments. Working systems.
What Success Looks Like
A successful engagement delivers a FedRAMP-authorized system — or a system architected for authorization — that passes the 3PAO assessment on the first attempt, with the System Security Plan, Security Assessment Report, and Plan of Action and Milestones ready before the assessment begins. Continuous monitoring requirements are satisfied by automated evidence collection, not manual quarterly exercises. CMMC 2.0 Level 2 assessment passes because the controls were implemented during the build, not documented after the fact. The agency's IT team can operate and maintain the system after the engagement closes without retaining a vendor support contract. The contracting officer has the ATO documentation. The security team has the control evidence package. The agency's mission is served by a working system, not a strategy deck.
Duration: 6 - 18 months
Output: Enterprise infrastructure + compliance certification
A federal agency modernizing mission-critical infrastructure typically engages at Tier III — large team, fixed price, working systems delivered.
What We Deploy in Government & Public Sector
Government & Public Sector Compliance Assessment
A structured checklist for evaluating your AI and software vendor's readiness across the key regulatory frameworks in Government. Free — no email required.
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Engineering Specifics — Government
Audit-trail architecture that captures the named user, the resource accessed, the operation performed, and the workstation identity in a format FEDRAMP examiners directly accept — not a log file that requires translation for an external audit.
Access-control logic enforced at the data layer rather than the application layer — every read of a regulated record validates authorization against the live scope of the requesting principal, preventing the cross-scope exposure that has produced multiple OCR and FFIEC findings in Government environments.
Encryption configured to the specific cipher-suite and key-management requirements FEDRAMP, STATERAMP, FISMA, NIST, FIPS 140 actually mandates, not the closest nominal default. Key rotation, key-access logging, and key-escrow architecture are designed at engagement intake, not after the first audit.
Incident-response architecture that satisfies the strictest notification timeline among FEDRAMP, STATERAMP, FISMA, NIST, FIPS 140. Pre-staged runbooks, pre-drafted regulator-facing templates, and automated detection-to-paging pipelines make the published notification deadlines architecturally enforceable rather than procedurally aspirational.
Continuous compliance evidence generation rather than retroactive assembly — every change-control event, access-provisioning event, and configuration update produces structured records aligned to FEDRAMP on the day the event happens, queued for the next audit pack with no manual reconstruction.
Quarterly audit pack delivered to your compliance officer without a request — workforce roster, access events, change attribution, incident register, training-currency report, mapped to FEDRAMP, STATERAMP, FISMA, NIST, FIPS 140 in the format your audit program already uses.
What We Ship — Government
A working production system in your tenancy, FEDRAMP-compliant from commit one, delivered on the named milestone date — not a discovery document, not a refactor backlog, not a phase-two scope-expansion request.
Compliance baseline documentation aligned to FEDRAMP, STATERAMP, FISMA, NIST, FIPS 140 for Government — workforce attribution logs, data-flow diagrams, access-control inventory, encryption-key inventory, incident-response runbook — delivered as engagement artifacts, not assembled before the first audit.
IP and source-code transfer effective from day one — your engineering team owns the repository, the deployment pipeline, the infrastructure-as-code; we do not hold operational hostage and the cost model rewards us for delivery, not retention.
Knowledge transfer that survives the engagement — every operational decision documented in runbooks an on-call engineer can follow at 3 AM without paging us. The deliverable is autonomy, not dependency.
ALICE compliance enforcement integrated into your CI pipeline before engagement close — FEDRAMP, STATERAMP, FISMA, NIST, FIPS 140 anti-patterns are blocked before they merge, so the compliance posture does not drift between audit cycles.
Post-engagement retainer optionally available for the first six months — defined escalation path to the original engagement team for incidents or critical questions. Most clients do not need it, because the system is designed to be operated without us.
Common Findings We Remediate — Government
Audit-trail gaps: log records that exist but cannot be joined back to a named user, a specific resource, and a timestamp from a synchronized source. Reconstructed under examination, the gaps show up as "we cannot determine who did this" — the finding regulators specifically write up under FEDRAMP, STATERAMP, FISMA, NIST, FIPS 140.
Authorization-vs-authentication confusion: code paths that verify the requesting principal is logged in but do not verify the principal is authorized for the specific resource. The result is cross-scope data exposure that has produced OCR, FFIEC, and ICO settlements in Government environments at scale.
Encryption configured to a nominal label rather than the specific cipher-suite, key-length, and key-management requirements FEDRAMP, STATERAMP, FISMA, NIST, FIPS 140 actually mandates. The audit finding is "encryption is implemented but not validated"; the architecture fix is to pin the implementation to a validated cryptographic module from engagement start.
Incident-response runbooks that exist as documents but have never been exercised against the specific notification timelines Government obligations impose. The first real incident is the wrong time to discover the runbook references a tool no one configured or a contact who no longer works at the organization.
Vendor-management and BAA-equivalent gaps: third-party services that receive regulated data without the contractual basis that FEDRAMP, STATERAMP, FISMA, NIST, FIPS 140 requires. The pattern is usually accidental — a new SaaS integration added during a sprint without compliance review — and produces a finding under every modern regulatory framework.
Compliance evidence assembled retroactively before the audit cycle, then re-assembled before the next one — burning meaningful margin for engagement work that should be generated continuously by the deployment pipeline. The fix is once: instrument the systems to produce audit evidence as a byproduct of normal operations, not on demand.
Why The Algorithm — Government
The Government engineering market is crowded with generalist firms claiming sector competence and sector specialists with limited engineering depth. The combination — deep engineering capability and operational Government compliance fluency — is rare, and that gap is where the most expensive vendor failures happen.
Our teams come through the Algonauts pipeline trained on FEDRAMP, STATERAMP, FISMA, NIST, FIPS 140 before they touch a client codebase in Government. The training is not optional and not certificate-only — engineers must demonstrate working competence on representative compliance scenarios before they are deployed. This is the reason our Government clients do not see the "compliance was an afterthought" pattern that drives most remediation engagements.
Engagement pricing is fixed. The price you agree at engagement start is the price at delivery. Scope changes that materially expand the engagement are negotiated transparently as change orders; we do not bury scope creep in velocity reports or sprint backlogs. The economic model rewards us for delivering, not for billing — and that alignment is the foundation under everything else above.
Common Procurement Questions — Government
How is this engagement different from staff augmentation?
Staff augmentation places named contractors against an hourly rate card; the client retains accountability for delivery, methodology, and code quality. Our engagements are fixed-price commitments against named milestones; we retain accountability for delivery and ship the system as a deliverable, not the engineers as a resource. The contractual posture, the team composition, and the economic incentives are different.
What happens if the engagement scope changes?
Material scope expansions are negotiated transparently as change orders against the original engagement. We do not bury scope creep in velocity reports or sprint backlogs. Minor clarifications and emergent design decisions are absorbed without change orders — the fixed-price commitment includes a reasonable allowance for in-scope adjustments that any real engineering project requires.
What does post-delivery support look like?
The deliverable is designed to be operated by your team without our continued involvement. Documentation, runbooks, and the ALICE compliance enforcement layer continue to enforce the standards after we leave. Optional retainer support is available for organizations that want a defined escalation path to the engagement team for the first six months; most clients do not need it.
How do you handle data access during the engagement?
Production data access for our engineers is mediated through the same compliance controls that govern your internal engineering team. Named workforce documentation, framework-specific training currency, background checks, and BAA or equivalent agreements are completed before access provisioning. Access events are logged with the engineer's named identity, not a shared service account.
What is the procurement path?
Most engagements begin with a 30-minute scoping conversation, followed by a written engagement proposal within five business days that specifies scope, milestones, fixed price, and named team members. Standard contracting cycles complete within two weeks of proposal acceptance. We are familiar with enterprise procurement gating (vendor onboarding, SOC 2 review, BAA execution, MSA negotiation) and we support these processes without billable consulting overhead.