Government Contracts Intelligence Briefing

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.