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Vendors are quoting “September pricing” with a straight face, and somewhere a chief financial officer is watching millions of dollars get obligated in 72 hours — not because the timing is right, but because the money dies at midnight on the 30th. That ritual is the single largest recurring transfer of negotiating leverage from the taxpayer to the vendor community. It happens every year, at every agency, on a schedule every sales rep in America has memorized. Earlier this year, an article in the Washington Post mentioned: the “use or lose” syndrome “places government negotiators in a poor bargaining posture.” Wait, that wasn’t an article from 2026, it was from 1980.