Government Contracts Intelligence Briefing

Defense contractors received some clarity into the shutdown plans for the Department of Defense/War (Department) when the Department released a memo outlining its contingency plans during this lapse in funding. 

With a potential government shutdown looming, contractors have a lot of work to plan and protect themselves as best they can from possible disruptions in performance and payment. Below we will provide steps to take in anticipation of a shutdown and once a shutdown occurs.

On April 15, 2025, President Trump issued an executive order, Restoring Common Sense to Federal Procurement, aimed at streamlining federal procurement. The Executive Order called for reforming the Federal Acquisition Regulation (“FAR”), the regulations that form the structure of most of the $1.5 trillion the federal government spends on contracts annually.

After years of starts and stops, the United States Department of Defense (DoD) has finished its roll-out of the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) program with the release of its implementing regulations. This program, first proposed about seven years ago, requires contractors to verify compliance with existing cybersecurity requirements through self-assessments, third-party certifications, or DoD-led reviews.

Last week, the Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP) and the Federal Acquisition Regulatory Council (FAR Council) released three new proposed deviations in their overhaul of the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR). 

We recently wrote about the Trump administration’s efforts to streamline the Federal Acquisition Regulation (“FAR”).  The FAR contains approximately 2,000 pages of regulations that guide hundreds of billions of dollars in acquisitions each year.  Some clauses in the FAR are mandated by a statute while others have been adopted over time to fix a problem, institute an Executive Order or because regulators thought it would be a best practice.  As detailed in a recent blog, the administration’s current effort is aimed at confining the FAR to provisions mandated by statute “or essential to sound procurement.”

The federal government has long maintained a preference for selecting commercial products and services in the federal procurement space.  This preference has been the case since at least the time President Clinton signed the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act of 1994 (FASA) into law, and has been reiterated by Congress since then, including in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Years 2016 and 2017, for example, and the preference is enshrined in Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) Part 12.

The 2,000 page Federal Acquisition Regulation (the “FAR”) has guided and dictated federal procurement for more than forty years.  Periodically, the FAR has been updated to make procurement more efficient and simpler. The Trump administration is now undertaking its own effort with the rollout of an executive order entitled “Restoring Common Sense to Federal Procurement.”  It goes without saying that significant changes to the FAR will impact how federal contractors and their subcontractors do business with the federal government.