The General Services Administration is near the cusp of releasing the plan for how it will reform the Federal Acquisition Regulation for civilian agencies.
Washington Technology has learned the plan is to strip out language not required by statute as well as non-essential regulations and put that material into a non-regulatory user guide that will include best practices and lessons learned.
GSA, NASA and the Office of Federal Procurement Policy are working to create a more lean regulatory framework. The Defense Department is also involved, but a source that WT spoke with only addressed civilian procurement.
Dr. Kevin Rhodes, a senior adviser in the Office of Management and Budget and OFPP, is leading the reform efforts. Rhods joined the government when the Trump administration came to office and has essentially replaced Christine Harada, who held the same position during the Biden administration.
Before joining the administration, Rhodes was an executive at Systecon North America and had a 25-year career in the Air Force.
The general idea of the FAR reforms is return to the basics of the 1994 Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act and the Clinger-Cohen era.
“Commercial item acquisitions were governed by far fewer rules than they are today,” the source said.
The belief is that the reform efforts will pay dividends in three ways:
- Faster acquisitions
- Less expensive acquisitions
- Fewer barriers to entry, which would attract more companies to the government market.
The changes will not take place in a vacuum. The government will follow a rulemaking process and collect comments from industry and other stakeholders.
But there will be class deviations so critical changes can happen more quickly, the source said.
The entire process is on an expedited timeline.
“I strongly expect we’ll see an executive order at some point,” the source said.
The user guide will not simply be a cut-and-paste of the material from the regulations and into the user guide.
“I don’t want to see rules cut and pasted into a guide because then people are going to say, well, their still rules. They are still in there,” the source said.
“The user guide will establish best practices and lessons learned that contracting officers and specialists can use when doing their acquisition planning,” the source said. “They won’t be actual rules.”
The best practices and lessons learned will be drawn from the government procurement and acquisition experience. Agencies know what works and what doesn’t and how to be innovative, the source said.
There also may be some congressional action needed like the Fostering Reform and Government Efficiency in Defense Act that is currently in Congress.
The bill includes increasing the level of micro-purchasing and simplified acquisition threshold.
Discussions are also ongoing about reforming the protest process by raising the dollar threshold for when a contract can be protested. The threshold currently applies to task order awards only.
“The idea is to apply those thresholds across the board,” the source said.
GSA and OFPP have internally completed work on changes they want to make to Part 1 of the FAR that covers items such as the FAR’s authorities, deviations from the FAR, and the roles and authorities of contracting officers.
OFPP is then responsible for putting those changes out for comment.
Work is also underway on Part 34, which defines what a major systems acquisition is, and the policies for acquisition planning and management for those systems.
After that, the plan is to work on Parts 10 and 12. Part 10 covers market research and Part 12 involves regulations over commercial products and services.
