Amidon Briefing · Program Guidance
September 23, 2026
What a Continuing Resolution Does to a Training Facility Project
Federal funding is running on a continuing resolution through 11 December 2026. For a program manager with a range, shoot house or EOD pit in the plan, the useful question is not whether that hurts — it is which parts of the project are actually frozen and which parts were never frozen at all.
The continuing resolution signed on 3 September holds most federal programs at fiscal 2026 levels and bars agencies from initiating, resuming or continuing a project that did not have fiscal 2026 appropriations behind it. That is a new-start prohibition, not a stop-work order on everything. The distinction decides whether a facility program spends the next eleven weeks idle or arrives at full-year appropriations with drawings finished and a package ready to execute.
“New Start” Is a Funding Test, Not a Calendar Test
A project is a new start if the current year is the first year it would draw appropriated funds for that purpose. It has nothing to do with whether ground has been broken or a requirement has been validated. A range project that was funded in fiscal 2026 and is mid-execution generally continues at the prior rate. One that was waiting on its first fiscal 2027 dollars does not begin. Your contracting officer and resource manager make that determination for your specific line — it is worth asking them explicitly rather than assuming which side of the line a project sits on.
Planning and Design Money Is a Separate Account
Military construction planning and design is funded and executed separately from the individual construction projects it supports, which is why it keeps moving when construction lines stall. In the Army’s own analysis of continuing-resolution effects for fiscal 2025, planning and design and minor construction were named among the activities that continue while specific range projects — an automated qualification range and an automated multipurpose machine gun range among them — were shown as delayed. Design is the work that a CR is least likely to touch, and the work that determines how fast everything downstream moves.
Repair Is Not Construction
Restoring an existing facility to its original function is treated differently from building new capability, and is typically sustained through operations and maintenance rather than a construction line. For a shoot house already in service, that distinction is the difference between a wall that gets repaired this quarter and a facility that sits degraded until December. If you have walls approaching the end of their serviceable face, this is the window — our ballistic repair work and the repair-or-replace framework exist for exactly this call.
Waiting Is Not Free
The Government Accountability Office found that continuing resolutions produced schedule effects in 36 of 74 acquisition programs it surveyed. Its sharpest facilities example: a contract at Joint Base San Antonio originally estimated at $579,000 was requoted at $1,445,000 after continuing-resolution delays in fiscal 2024. The Department has operated under a CR in 37 of the last 49 fiscal years. Treating this as an unusual event that will pass is how eleven weeks of available design time gets spent waiting.
What Should Be Finished by 11 December
A site survey completed. A layout validated against the actual training scenarios rather than a generic template. Panel configuration and structural approach settled. A specification section written with the threat, the assembly and the test conditions stated rather than left to a vendor to interpret. That package is what separates a program that obligates quickly from one that spends the first month after appropriations answering questions it could have answered in October. Our design services and 3D modeling and simulation are built around that sequence.
Settle the Vehicle Before the Money Lands
The constraint after 11 December is rarely the requirement — it is the time it takes to get from a validated requirement to an executable award. Identifying the contract vehicle, confirming the socioeconomic path, and having a scope and drawing set a contracting officer can act on are all work that can be done now, under a CR, with no new appropriation required. Amidon is a certified Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business, which is a set-aside path worth confirming against your acquisition strategy while there is time to change it.
The projects that move fastest in December are not the ones that were luckiest in the appropriations cycle. They are the ones whose program managers used the CR to finish the design work, settle the specification, and remove every question that could have been answered without a dollar of new money.
CR Readiness Review
Tell us what is in your plan, and we will tell you what can move now
Send us the facility, the training requirement and roughly where the project sits. We will come back with what can realistically be advanced before full-year appropriations, what has to wait, and what the design and specification package should contain so the project is ready to execute the week funding lands. No obligation, and nothing you send is shared outside Amidon.
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