Hunton Retail Law Resource

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.

On August 6, 2020, President Trump signed executive orders imposing new economic sanctions under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. § 1701 et seq.) and the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. § 1601 et seq.) against TikTok, a video-sharing mobile application, and WeChat, a messaging, social media and mobile payments application. The orders potentially affect tens of millions of U.S. users of these applications and billions of users worldwide.

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