Custom Software for Government — Built Accessible, Built Secure, Built to Pass Review

FedRAMP and StateRAMP baselines, FISMA obligations on federal systems, NIST 800-53 controls, NIST 800-171 and CMMC 2.0 for contractors touching Controlled Unclassified Information, the Authority to Operate process with its SSPs and POA&Ms, and Section 508 accessibility on everything the public touches — government is one of the most documentation-heavy software environments there is. A consumer-grade SaaS will not survive a security-control assessment. A code base written by a contractor who has never read NIST 800-53 will not either.

We build to those frameworks from the first architecture diagram. Controls are mapped to implementations, not bolted on at the end. CUI and PII are encrypted at rest and in transit with FIPS-validated crypto. Role-based access and least privilege run through every administrative surface, audit logs are immutable by design, and the system emits the continuous-monitoring signal your authorizing official and assessor expect to see. Accessibility is wired in at the component layer so the Section 508 conformance claim in your ACR is true.

Most industries answer to one or two frameworks. A single citizen-facing benefits portal can sit at the intersection of half a dozen. It has to align with a FISMA-derived NIST 800-53 control baseline, conform to Section 508 because the public uses it, honor records-retention schedules and FOIA-readiness because the data is a government record, protect PII under agency privacy rules, and — if a contractor in the supply chain touches CUI — satisfy NIST 800-171 and CMMC on top. That is before the procurement vehicle, the period of performance, and the deliverable-based milestones impose their own structure on how the work is even allowed to proceed.

The process compounds the engineering. Public-sector procurement moves on RFP and RFQ timelines, statements of work, and authorization gates that have nothing to do with how fast you can write code. An ATO package is its own deliverable. The volume of audit-relevant events, the demand for evidence on demand, and the expectation of continuous monitoring mean lazy logging or untested encryption becomes a finding inside one assessment cycle. And the integrations are their own world — identity via SAML and PIV/CAC, inter-agency data exchanges, GIS-adjacent services, and legacy systems that may still be COBOL on a mainframe. Each one has its own constraints, its own owners, and its own approvals. We plan for that reality instead of discovering it mid-build.

FedRAMP and StateRAMP. If your system runs in the cloud for a federal or state agency, it is measured against a FedRAMP or StateRAMP baseline — most commonly FedRAMP Moderate, sometimes Low. We build to those baselines and produce the technical evidence the package needs. The authorization belongs to the system owner and sponsoring agency; we engineer to the controls and stay honest about that boundary.

FISMA and NIST 800-53. Federal information systems inherit a FISMA-driven control baseline drawn from NIST 800-53. We map each applicable control family — access control, audit and accountability, identification and authentication, system and communications protection — to a concrete implementation and document it in System Security Plan language an assessor can verify.

NIST 800-171 and CMMC 2.0. Contractors in the defense industrial base handling CUI fall under DFARS 252.204-7012, NIST 800-171, and a CMMC 2.0 assessment. We implement the relevant 800-171 controls and help assemble the SSP and POA&M evidence. The certification is obtained through a C3PAO — our job is to make the system support it.

The ATO process. Authority to Operate is the gate. We support it with the technical body of evidence — control-to-implementation crosswalks, architecture diagrams, hardened configuration baselines, scan results, and audit-log samples — and we track open items as a POA&M so the path to authorization is explicit rather than a surprise at the end.

Section 508 and WCAG 2.1 AA. Anything the public touches has to conform to Section 508, which incorporates WCAG 2.1 Level AA. We build accessibility in at the component layer and test with NVDA, JAWS, and VoiceOver, then produce an Accessibility Conformance Report on the VPAT template so the conformance claim in your solicitation response is defensible.

Data: PII, CUI, records retention, and FOIA. Government data is a government record. We build to applicable records-retention schedules, keep data FOIA-ready with the right metadata and export paths, handle PII and CUI under the controls the boundary requires, and implement e-signature consistent with applicable rules. We do not give legal advice — we build the audit trail, consent capture, and retention logic your counsel and records officer will rely on.

Next.js 16 on the App Router with React 19 and TypeScript end-to-end, built on accessibility-first component patterns so Section 508 and WCAG 2.1 AA conformance is structural rather than retrofitted. Postgres for the system of record. Prisma or Drizzle as the type-safe ORM. Server-side validation on every form, RBAC and least privilege on every administrative surface, and immutable, append-only audit logs in a store separate from application data. Authentication via SSO — SAML, OIDC, and PIV/CAC-aware where the agency identity provider requires it.

For the data plane we deploy into a hardened VPC, and into AWS GovCloud (US) when the contract or the CUI boundary calls for it. Encryption uses FIPS 140-2/140-3 validated modules, with KMS-backed envelope encryption for sensitive columns. Continuous-monitoring (ConMon) tooling feeds vulnerability scanning, configuration drift detection, and log aggregation into the evidence stream the authorization expects. Observability is PII- and CUI-aware with redaction baked into the logger. The public web tier can sit behind an agency-approved edge while the sensitive backend stays inside the authorized boundary — keeping the attack surface small and the audit story clean.

Three patterns repeat. First, accessibility gets treated as a final-week cleanup instead of a design constraint. The team ships a slick portal, then fails the Section 508 review on keyboard traps, missing labels, and contrast — and discovers that retrofitting conformance means re-touching nearly every component. Accessibility built in from the component layer is cheap; accessibility bolted on at the end is a rebuild.

Second, the system gets built and only then does someone ask how it will get its ATO. Controls were never mapped, audit logging is thin, configuration is undocumented, and the security-control assessment turns into a scramble to manufacture evidence after the fact. The fix is to treat the SSP, the control crosswalk, and the audit log as first-class deliverables from the start — not paperwork generated under deadline pressure at the end.

Third, teams overscope the first release against the procurement. A solicitation hints at a grand multi-module platform, and the build tries to deliver all of it at once, late, against a fixed period of performance. The realistic path is one workflow, one user group, one accessible release — delivered against a clear milestone, demonstrated to the agency, and built on from there. We push hard for that discipline because deliverable-based milestones reward shipped, defensible increments over a sprawling system that misses its dates.

The thing that gets public-sector projects in trouble is rarely a single bug. It is CUI sitting on a laptop in another country, a subcontractor who copied a government dataset, or a control that was claimed in the SSP but never actually implemented. Data-handling discipline and accurate evidence are the quiet existential requirements in government engineering — and they are exactly why we are US-based, founder-led, and engagement-first on every project.

William Beltz writes or reviews every line of code that touches citizen data, CUI, or an authorization boundary. NDAs are mutual and signed before discovery. Source code lives in your repository, not ours, and sensitive data stays inside the boundary you authorize. The handoff is documented for either ongoing collaboration or in-house ownership — your call, and your records officer's.

Assessors and authorizing officials want penetration testing scoped to the system boundary and to the adversaries the public sector actually faces — nation-state actors probing government infrastructure, hacktivists targeting public-facing services, and commodity ransomware that does not care who you are. We run penetration testing aligned to the Risk Management Framework, then map every finding to NIST 800-53 controls so the results feed your assessment and continuous-monitoring program directly. The deliverable is written to populate a POA&M, not just to sit in an inbox.

Coverage spans the surfaces that matter for government systems — the external perimeter, the internal network, and the web application and API behind every citizen portal. For threat-group-aligned testing we map adversary techniques with a MITRE ATT&CK assessment, producing a heatmap of which techniques succeed, which get detected, and which get blocked, so your SOC or MSSP knows exactly what to alert on.

Boundary-first deployment. The pattern that keeps a government system authorizable is a small, well-defined boundary. The public web tier sits behind an agency-approved edge; the sensitive data plane lives in a hardened VPC, or AWS GovCloud (US) when the CUI or contract requires it. Every crossing of that boundary is authenticated, authorized, and logged, which keeps both the attack surface and the audit story small.

Evidence as a build artifact. Audit logs are immutable and append-only in a store separate from application data. Control implementations are documented as they are written, so the SSP crosswalk and the configuration baseline are produced alongside the code rather than reconstructed under deadline. Continuous-monitoring tooling emits the scanning and drift-detection signal an authorization expects to see on an ongoing basis.

Accessible-by-default front ends. Citizen-facing surfaces are built on component patterns that bake in semantic markup, keyboard operability, focus management, and contrast — so Section 508 and WCAG 2.1 AA conformance is a property of the system, validated with assistive technology and captured in an ACR, rather than a remediation project after launch.