The acquisition rule (re)writers really want you to have your say
During a Wednesday virtual town hall for industry, the General Services Administration’s senior procurement executive Jeff Koses said those in charge of the effort are “regularly reading the feedback” as they go through the 2,000-page Federal Acquisition Regulation to determine what stays in and what will not.
The White House’s Office of Federal Procurement Policy and the FAR Council are leading the push to significantly shrink the FAR to provisions required by law or “essential to sound procurement.”
OFPP and the FAR Council have unveiled changes and started issuing class deviations related to four parts of the rulebook so far:
- Part 1, which describes the federal acquisition regulation system
- Part 34, which covers major system acquisitions
- Part 10, which covers market research by agencies
- Part 52, which covers solicitation provisions and contract clauses.
“The FAR has to include all the basic necessities of federal contracting, these are necessities that may or may not be codified in law,” Koses said. “In some cases, Congress has specified a step or a specific part of the acquisition process, and they wouldn't make sense if they were left on their own.”
Determinations on what stays in the new FAR and what will not are taking place through a workstream involving regulation writers at the General Services Administration, the Defense Department and NASA.
Koses pointed attendees to the Acquisition.gov website to see the output of that workstream, look at the government’s growing list of master deviations to implement the changes, and yes take the opportunity to provide feedback.
But as Koses cautioned at the town hall, industry should not count on any replies to their comments at this time.
“We're not going to formally respond to the feedback in this stage. We're reading it. We're having conversations that may influence some of the other material, and it will certainly influence us when we move to the rulemaking stage,” Koses said. “Each FAR part (change) will have a 45 day-feedback period as the standard.”
Koses also had this second word of caution to the industry: the regulation rewriting workstream is “going to move fast” and “through a series of deviations” as those teams remove several sets of process-related instructions.
In one example Koses offered, “the contracting officer shall” is a phrase that appears approximately 1,500 times in the FAR today.
“Lots of those shalls will go away and that means our contracting officers are going to be more empowered. It also means more than a few security blankets may disappear,” Koses said. "I expect and hope more than one small business is excited at the chance to enter a new market with lower barriers to entry, with less regulations. I also expect more than one of you has concerns about the potential output.”
Which makes the FAR overhaul page on Acquisition.gov an “indispensable resource and your opportunity for feedback,” Koses said.
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