Update on the FAR Overhaul

As of August 28, 2025, the project to overhaul the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) has finished FAR Parts 1, 4-6, 8-12, 18, 26, 28-31, 33-36, 38-40, 43, 46, 48-51, and various sections of Parts 2 and 52. One can review the up-to-date progress on the overhaul here, and the FAR Council is welcoming informal feedback. Although the project is not complete and has not yet begun formal notice and comment rulemaking, things have advanced enough for us to offer some initial observations:

• The overhaul will result in a much shorter FAR, with far fewer mandates. At least some of the excised material will find its way into non-mandatory practice guides that are currently being prepared for the federal acquisition workforce. Functionally, this make make some challenges to Government action harder, as it is generally more difficult to challenge an abuse of discretion than cut-and-dried violations of a nondiscretionary mandate.
• The implementation of the overhaul has proceeded at different paces in different agencies. For the time being, the traditional FAR continues in full force except for those agencies that have implemented the overhauled FAR parts through class deviations. You can see which agencies have adopted which overhauled FAR parts on the acquisition.gov website. At this time, the General Services Administration (GSA) is the only agency to have adopted all of the overhauled parts.
• Once the overhaul is complete, the FAR Council will subject the overhauled FAR to formal notice and comment rulemaking for eventual promulgation as a regulation with the force of law. Until that happens, the legal status of the class deviations is murky. In that regard, the Office of Federal Procurement Policy Act generally requires a significant procurement policy change to undergo notice and comment rulemaking in the Federal Register for at least 60 days before it may go into effect. 41 U.S.C. § 1707(a)-(b). Although agencies regularly implement significant class deviations from the FAR without going through the statutory notice-and-comment process, such deviations are vulnerable to legal challenge by an aggrieved party.
• The changes will be felt most strongly by the federal acquisition workforce, as the overhaul removes a great many of the instructions for how they should conduct procurements. Time will tell if the forthcoming non-mandatory practice guides and promised training on best practices will improve the procurement process, or whether the removal of so many of the FAR’s instructions will make things worse. This is a particular concern given sometimes significant reductions in force, including among agencies’ most experienced contracting personnel
• The vast majority of the overhaul changes to date will have little or no direct effect on contractors. With a few exceptions, the changes to date will affect contractors only indirectly as agency officials get used to a rulebook with fewer commands and prohibitions about how to procure goods and services.

There will, however, be widespread interest among contractors in certain of the changes. Among the most prominent of the changes that will directly and perhaps significantly affect contractors are the following:

• The overhauled FAR 8.104 creates a mandatory preference for using best-in-class governmentwide contracts and agreements to fill requirements, and a discretionary preference for using governmentwide contracts and agreements that have not been designated as best-in-class. As we recently discussed, this will drive greater centralization and increase the already strong incentive for contractors to obtain (including by acquisition) valuable governmentwide acquisition contracts and GSA Multiple Award Schedule contracts. The accelerated move to these vehicles may also signal fewer small business set-aside opportunities, as the small business Rule of Two is not mandatory for Multiple Award Schedule procurements, and authorities are divided as to whether it is mandatory for task order procurements. For years now, small business advocates have been noting the tension between small business contracting opportunities and the steady march of category management. This change may also lead to a larger move to corporate consolidation because any contractor—large or small—not holding multiple best-in-class contracts will likely see its opportunities significantly reduced.
• In connection with the overhauled FAR Part 12, the overhauled FAR 52.212-1 has a seemingly small alteration that introduces a major change to the Late Is Late rule for untimely proposals. We anticipate a similar change when FAR 52.215-1 is overhauled. The traditional FAR text contains a series of exceptions, which have been the source of much litigation and limit the circumstances in which an agency may accept a late proposal or late proposal revision—even when a proposal is only one minute late. Under the overhauled FAR 52.212-1, the contracting officer may accept the late offer, as long as it received before award and “accepting the late offer would not unduly delay the acquisition.” This significantly simplifies the process for accepting late proposals, without having to argue about whose IT system was at fault for a delay.
• In the overhauled FAR Part 33, there is an interesting addition that will increase transparency for companies that file agency-level protests. When a protester seeks review at a level above the contracting officer (which is fairly common), the overhauled FAR 33.104-4 now requires the agency to provide the protester with “a redacted copy of the source selection decision, if applicable, or if not already provided to the protester.” In conjunction with this, the overhauled regulation also requires agencies to “[p]rovide the protester an opportunity to submit a supplemental statement to the independent review official based on the documents provided.” These are significant improvements to what the current opaque, file-and-forget agency-level protest process usually offers.
• The FAR Council has yet to overhaul FAR Part 19, which addresses small business programs and currently enshrines the regulatory Rule of Two, which governs which procurements must be set aside for small business. Small business contractors are anxiously awaiting that overhaul, but the removal of small business provisions from Part 10 (Market Research), Part 35 (Research and Development Contracting), and Part 36 (Construction and Architect-Engineer Contracts) has certainly raised eyebrows.