Congress Votes Today to Stop the Federal Government From Stiffing Small Contractors

Small construction contractors working on federal projects have a familiar, expensive problem: the government orders a change mid-project, the contractor has no choice but to do the work, and the payment for that work doesn't show up for months — sometimes not until the entire contract closes out. On Wednesday, September 17, 2026, the House Small Business Committee is voting on a bill designed to stop that from happening, as part of a markup covering ten separate small-business bills in one sitting.

What's Happening Today

The House Small Business Committee's full committee markup begins at 9:45 a.m. ET in the Rayburn House Office Building. A markup is the stage where lawmakers formally debate, amend, and vote on whether to advance a bill out of committee — it's the last stop before a bill can reach the House floor. Ten bills are on the agenda, but two in particular carry direct financial consequences for small business owners: the Small Business Payment for Performance Act and the Cybersecurity for Small Businesses Act.

Neither bill has passed yet. A committee vote today would move them closer to a full House vote, but they would still need Senate action and a presidential signature before becoming law. Still, for owners who've been waiting years for federal payment practices to change, a committee vote is real progress — and it's worth understanding exactly what's on the table.

The Change Order Problem: Why Small Contractors Eat the Cost

Here's how it plays out on a federal construction site today. A contracting officer decides mid-project that something needs to change — a different material, a redesigned wall, an added safety requirement. Under current federal contracting rules, the government can issue that change order unilaterally, without the contractor's agreement and sometimes without complete written documentation of scope.

The contractor has to perform the work anyway. But because the change wasn't part of the original signed contract, payment for it gets tied up in a separate claims process that can take months to resolve. In the meantime, the contractor has already paid for materials, labor, and equipment out of pocket. For a large general contractor with deep cash reserves, that's an inconvenience. For a small subcontractor running on thin margins, it can mean missing payroll, delaying other jobs, or taking out expensive short-term financing just to stay afloat.

The Associated General Contractors of America has flagged this exact dynamic as a structural problem in federal work, noting that change orders "further drive up risk and costs that the construction company is often forced to absorb." Rising material prices over the past two years have only made the cash-flow gap more painful.

What the Payment for Performance Act Would Do

Rep. Pete Stauber's Small Business Payment for Performance Act, reintroduced this Congress as H.R. 4615, targets that gap directly with two changes:

• Small businesses would gain a clear right to request an "equitable adjustment" from the contracting officer whenever a change order is issued without their consent.
• The federal government would be required to pay at least 50% of the estimated change order cost as an interim payment once that request is submitted — rather than making the contractor wait for the entire claim to be resolved.

That 50% interim payment is the practical fix. It doesn't resolve every dispute over final pricing, but it gets real cash into a contractor's account while the paperwork is still being sorted out, instead of forcing the business to finance the government's own project changes. If you run a contracting business and rely on a profit and loss statement to track job costs in real time, this kind of delay is exactly the sort of gap that can turn a profitable contract into a loss on paper.

The Cybersecurity Bill Riding Along in the Same Markup

The second bill worth watching, the Cybersecurity for Small Businesses Act (H.R. 10238), tackles a completely different pain point: confusion — and unnecessary spending — around the Pentagon's cybersecurity requirements for contractors.

The Department of War's Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) program requires businesses that handle certain defense-related information to meet tiered security standards before they can bid on or perform federal contracts. According to the bill's sponsors, the requirements have been confusing enough that many small businesses ended up spending "upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars" complying with security requirements they may not have actually needed for their specific contract tier.

What the Bill Changes

Rather than rewriting CMMC itself, the bill focuses on getting small businesses accurate information before they spend the money:

• It requires the Small Business Administration to coordinate with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to publish clear cybersecurity best-practice guidance for small businesses.
• It requires the SBA, working with the Department of War, to explain specifically which CMMC tier applies to which type of contractor — so a business doesn't over-invest in security controls it doesn't need.
• It adds the SBA's Chief Counsel for Advocacy to the process of deciding how that information gets distributed.
• It creates an annual reporting requirement so Congress can track whether the guidance is actually reaching small contractors.

For a small business that touches any federal defense contract — even as a subcontractor two or three layers removed from the prime contractor — this bill is really about avoiding a very specific kind of waste: paying a cybersecurity consultant to build out Tier 3 protections when the contract only requires Tier 1.

The Other Eight Bills on the Table

The markup also includes eight additional bills covering a range of small-business issues: the Combating Foreign Threats to Main Street Act, the Disaster Loan Outreach Consistency Act, the SBIC Reporting Modernization Act, the 504 Program Level Flexibility Act, the Reshoring American Manufacturing Act, and the Badge to Business Act, among others. Several of these touch SBA lending programs directly — the 504 program, for instance, is a common route small businesses use for real estate and equipment financing, often paired with a conventional SBA loan to cover a purchase.

What This Means for Your Business Right Now

If you're a small contractor currently working — or bidding — on a federal project, none of these bills change your rights today. They still need to clear the full House, the Senate, and get a presidential signature. But a committee markup is a meaningful signal that these issues have enough bipartisan attention to move forward, and it's worth tracking as the bills advance.

In the meantime, there are steps that protect your business regardless of what Congress does:

• Document every verbal or informal change order in writing immediately, even if the contracting officer hasn't issued formal paperwork yet.
• Keep a dedicated business bank account for each major federal contract so you can see exactly how much unpaid change-order work is tying up your cash at any given time.
• If cybersecurity compliance is part of your contract, ask your contracting officer in writing which specific CMMC tier applies before hiring a consultant or buying new security tools.
• Review your business insurance coverage, including any cyber liability policy, to confirm it matches what your federal contracts actually require rather than a generic estimate.

Congress has tried versions of payment-timing reform before without passing them into law, so it's reasonable to stay cautiously optimistic rather than assume this markup guarantees a fix. But for an industry where a single unpaid change order can be the difference between a good quarter and a cash crunch, even incremental movement in Washington is worth watching closely.

Photo by Scott Blake on Unsplash