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 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.