The compliance tax: what it actually costs to ship software to the U.S. government

Engineering organizations, especially those in defense contracting, face significant compliance challenges due to complex federal frameworks like FedRAMP, CMMC, and EO 14028, which require continuous verification rather than periodic audits. These frameworks demand extensive manual labor, with companies spending substantial time on compliance checks that can lead to severe project delays if missed. The lack of central enforcement and reliance on manual evidence assembly exacerbate these issues, as compliance steps are often skipped and audits become high-risk events. Automated solutions like Earthly Lunar aim to address these problems by collecting compliance data continuously during the software development lifecycle, thereby reducing the manual burden and enabling platform teams to focus on enhancing system reliability and delivery speed. Such tools are designed to operate in self-hosted, air-gapped environments, making them suitable for high-security contexts, and aim to provide reusable, composable compliance evidence across multiple projects and classification levels.