 The 2016 federal fiscal year ends today and so has — for now — fears over another government shutdown as President Barack Obama signed a bill late Thursday to extend funding for agencies at current spending levels through December 9.
This “clean” stopgap package puts the focus on Congress’ post-election lame duck session to keep agencies running through FY 2017 and would seemingly give lawmakers another opportunity to move on a full-year or longer term government spending bill. Recent history of course has suggested any compromise will be hard to come by in this political environment but agencies and contractors always hold out hope for a deal and subsequent certainty. With that out of the way, we will use the remainder of this space to highlight two key news items from the GovCon arena this week with respect to financial/M&A and global defense. Technology investment group Vista Equity Partners has returned to M&A’s buyer side through its $153 million deal for public sector cloud company GovDelivery announced Monday. Vista owns one-fifth of cybersecurity company ForcePoint, which was formed out of the former Websense business that Raytheon bought majority control of last year. Also, reports surfaced Wednesday that the White House approved close to $7 billion in requests by Kuwait and Qatar to purchase Boeing-built fighter jets and a separate $1 billion sale of Lockheed Martin-made combat aircraft to Bahrain. The next morning, DSCA Director Joseph Rixey addressed the Potomac Officers Club’s “International Military Programs” event to update GovCon executive attendees on the state of America’s foreign military sales program and ways for industry to help in the effort. Rixey told Reuters in July the U.S. was on track at the time to close $40 billion in FMS transactions for FY 2016 and demand from allies is not slowing down in light of the world’s security environment. Deloitte forecasts worldwide defense spending to total $1.6 trillion through 2020 despite some reductions in the U.S. with Asia-Pacific countries’ expenditures predicted to go up and that gives large primes and others opportunities for both increased volume and diversified sales. THE WEEK’S OTHER TOP 10 GOVCON STORIES | 
