After unveiling a series of immediate acquisition changes over the summer, the Trump administration is on track to debut a formal rulemaking to overhaul and streamline the Federal Acquisition Regulation, or the FAR, this fall.
Larry Allen, the associate administrator for General Services Administration’s Office of Government-wide Policy, discussed the ongoing FAR revisions and the forthcoming rulemaking during AFCEA Bethesda’s “Health IT” conference in Washington on Wednesday.
Under an April executive order, the White House Office of Federal Procurement Policy and the FAR Council are leading an effort to “return the FAR to its statutory roots, rewritten in plain language, and remove most non-statutory rules.”
In recent months, the FAR Council has issued a series of “class deviations” for multiple parts of the FAR. Recent deviations have focused on prioritizing the use of governmentwide contracts and simplifying commercial acquisition.
“The deviations that we put forth have already been put in place with the aim of changing government procurement, not tomorrow, but right now, during the fourth quarter before the end of the fiscal year,” Allen said today.
The executive order gave OFPP and the FAR Council until Oct. 13 to take initial actions to amend the FAR to “ensure that it contains only provisions that are required by statute or that are otherwise necessary to support simplicity and usability, strengthen the efficacy of the procurement system, or protect economic or national security interests.”
In follow-up guidance to the executive order, the Office of Management and Budget said the FAR Council will turn to formal rulemaking after it has posted model deviations for all FAR parts.
The “Revolutionary FAR Overhaul” website shows the council has issued deviations for 30 FAR parts, while 23 parts are still awaiting overhaul.
“When we go out for formal rulemaking and comment, which we will do sometime in the fall, please make sure that you are giving us your input,” Allen told the conference audience today. “We’re trying hard to do it very, very well, but we certainly don’t have the corner on the best ideas.”
Industry has been broadly supportive of the Trump administration’s efforts to rewrite the government’s acquisition rules. Stephanie Kostro, president of the Professional Services Council, said PSC is working to understand how the different class deviations work in conjunction with each other.
“We’re going through that right now, but I would say with the flooding of the Class Deviation market, so to speak, with 12 of them coming out in August alone, we are scrambling to figure out how they all work together,” Kostro said on the Federal Drive with Terry Gerton this week. “And so that’s what we’re focusing on, is the interconnectivity of all of these different pieces that are moving.”
FAR changes ‘just the beginning’
The changes the Trump administration is making to government procurement are among the most far-reaching since the contracting reforms of the 1990’s. But Allen said reforming the FAR is “just the beginning.”
“Make no mistake – this is just the first phase,” Allen said. “We don’t reform the FAR once and then let it sit. We continually innovate and look for new ways to acquire things.”
Allen said stripping down the FAR is also just “one part of the problem.” He pointed to the need to also revise each agency’s FAR supplement. For instance, the Pentagon’s Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement, or DFARS, is a 610-page document in its own right.
“When we take away burdens and we make things easier at the FAR level, one of the things we’re trying to guard against is having individual agencies say, ‘well, that’s really great for the FAR but we need to do it this way here,’ and have them not be as innovative as our intent is for the entire government to be in acquisition,” Allen said.
Officials leading the FAR overhaul also want to ensure the “acquisition workforce comes along for the ride,” Allen said.
“We are not going to see the changes that we want to see or realize the savings in time and money unless the acquisition workforce is bought along with us and understands what we’re trying to do, but is also part of the process,” he said. “One of the things I’ve been really excited about is just how much buy in we’ve gotten from both industry and government people.”
Allen said both the Federal Acquisition Institute and the Defense Acquisition University are already updating their curriculum to account for new deviations to the FAR.
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