What Is the SAMOSA Act? Requirements, Savings, and Status

The SAMOSA Act, short for the Strengthening Agency Management and Oversight of Software Assets Act, is a bipartisan bill that would require every federal agency to inventory its software, flag waste, and put together a plan to cut costs on licenses. It has passed the House of Representatives twice but has not been signed into law. The most recent version, H.R. 5457, cleared the House and was referred to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs in December 2025.¹ Supporters say it could save taxpayers up to $5 billion a year out of a federal IT budget of roughly $100 billion.²

Senator Gary Peters first introduced the legislation in the 117th Congress as S. 4908.³ It was reintroduced in the 119th Congress, first as H.R. 2417 and then as H.R. 5457.⁴ Despite bipartisan support in both chambers, the bill has never been folded into the National Defense Authorization Act, contrary to earlier reports.

What the Bill Would Require

The heart of the SAMOSA Act is a mandatory software assessment. Under H.R. 5457, each agency’s Chief Information Officer would have 18 months after enactment to finish a full review, working with the Chief Financial Officer, Chief Acquisition Officer, Chief Data Officer, and General Counsel.⁵

That assessment has to cover a lot of ground. Agencies would inventory every piece of active software along with its contracts and entitlements, broken down by vendor and category. They would also have to account for software that has been paid for but never deployed, and software that duplicates something the agency already owns. The review must flag hidden costs that don’t appear in a contract’s sticker price, such as cloud usage fees and upgrade charges that pile up over time.⁵

Agencies would also need to flag restrictive licensing terms. Those are the contract clauses that limit how software can be used, for example by blocking the move of a product from a desktop environment to a cloud provider, or locking up agency data. The bill asks agencies to assess how well their products work together and what steps they have taken to improve interoperability.⁵

Once the assessment is done, the CIO would use it to build a management plan. Each plan must lay out how the agency will adopt enterprise licensing agreements, strengthen its negotiating position with vendors, and reduce overall costs.⁴ Plans go to the Office of Management and Budget, the General Services Administration, and Congress.² Intelligence Community elements are covered too, not just traditional civilian agencies.⁶ To keep the process from being one-and-done, agencies would have to include their plans and performance results in their annual budget submissions from then on.

How the Savings Would Actually Happen

OMB and GSA are the two agencies that turn the individual assessments into government-wide savings. Within two years of enactment, OMB would send Congress recommendations on software procurement policy, including a strategy for enterprise licenses covering widely used products.⁶ Enterprise licensing means the government negotiates one deal for software used by many agencies, instead of letting each agency cut its own contract at a higher per-seat price. OMB would also set the guidance and formatting rules that agencies must follow when running their assessments, which matters because inconsistent tracking is a big part of why nobody in the government currently knows what it owns.

GSA’s job is to aggregate the data across agencies and spot cost-saving opportunities that no single agency can see on its own.³ When the federal government buys as one customer rather than hundreds, vendors have less leverage to charge premium prices.

The Problem the Bill Is Trying to Fix

The Government Accountability Office has documented the waste for years. A 2024 GAO review of nine large federal agencies found that none of them could fully determine whether their five most widely used software products were over- or under-purchased. License data was so inconsistent that auditors could not even identify the most widely used products across the government.⁷ GAO issued 18 recommendations calling on agencies to start tracking license usage consistently and compare inventories against what they have actually bought.

Specific examples give the numbers some texture. NASA spent roughly $15 million over five years on unused licenses. The Environmental Protection Agency missed $1 million in software licenses that never made it into its inventory.⁷ The same 2024 GAO report also flagged restrictive licensing in cloud computing as a major area of avoidable cost. Agencies buy software, lose track of it, and keep paying for it after anyone stops using it.

Where the Bill Stands Now

As of late 2025, H.R. 5457 has passed the House and is pending in the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.¹ The bill has bipartisan backing in both chambers, but it stalled in the Senate during the previous Congress too. Until the Senate acts and the President signs, the SAMOSA Act’s requirements are proposals, not law. No federal agency is currently obligated to run the assessments or file the management plans it describes.

1
Congress.gov. H.R.5457 – Strengthening Agency Management and Oversight of Software Assets Act
2
Representative Shontel Brown. Congresswoman Brown’s Bipartisan SAMOSA Act to Save Taxpayer Dollars on Federal Software Spending Clears Oversight Committee
3
Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs. Peters Leads Colleagues to Reintroduce Bipartisan Bill to Streamline Federal Software Purchases and Save Taxpayer Dollars
4
Representative Shontel Brown. Brown, Mace, Fallon, and McClain Delaney Reintroduce SAMOSA Act to Streamline Federal Software Purchasing and Lower Costs
5
Congress.gov. H.R.5457 – Strengthening Agency Management and Oversight of Software Assets Act – Full Text
6
Congress.gov. H.R.2417 – Strengthening Agency Management and Oversight of Software Assets Act
7
U.S. GAO. Federal Software Licenses: Agencies Need to Take Action to Achieve Additional Savings