FAR Council opens formal comment window on historic procurement rewrite
Four new proposed rules land with an Oct. 19 deadline, commercial tech firms have one month to shape the acquisition framework that will govern their federal revenue for roughly 30 years.
TL;DR
The FAR Council published four additional proposed rules on Sept. 18, bringing the total to eight of a planned twelve, for the first comprehensive rewrite of the Federal Acquisition Regulation since the 1990s. Comments are due October 19. The overhaul streamlines how agencies buy cloud, software, and AI, removing clause checklists, letting commercial terms drive applicability, and shifting the default away from government-added requirements. Companies that sell technology to the federal government and stay silent risk letting legacy players write the rules for the next three decades.
The scale of this is worth stating plainly: the FAR hasn't been rebuilt top-to-bottom since the 1990s, when Congress passed two acquisition reform laws and the Council rewrote Part 12 for commercial items and Part 15 for negotiated contracts. Those changes governed federal buying for roughly 30 years. This rewrite, under Executive Order 14275 and OMB Memo M-25-26, is designed to last just as long. Regulations adopted through notice-and-comment are hard to move; undoing them takes another full rulemaking cycle. Whatever gets finalized in the next year locks in for a generation.
The framework shift is real. Today's contracts carry long checklists of statutes and executive orders, and contracting officers can layer on more at their discretion. The proposed rules remove the checklists. Each clause would state on its face whether it applies to commercial buys, and agencies would need to issue a deviation to add more. Commercial software would carry the rights in the license the government purchased, parity with how companies go to market commercially today. Cloud computing could move to consumption-based purchases.
But the open question matters as much as what's already drafted. The line between commercial and non-commercial technology needs to be sharp. Software built with mixed funding raises genuine questions about license retention and right-of-use that the draft rules don't fully resolve. And new flexibility for agencies to tailor commercial clauses needs guardrails, a company selling the same product to two agencies shouldn't face two different sets of rules.
The process has been unusually open from the start. OFPP and the FAR Council released rewritten FAR parts as model deviations last year with public comment channels before formal rulemaking began. GSA and the Council published a feedback matrix showing exactly what they changed based on industry input. They used that input to make the model deviations less burdensome for small and non-traditional contractors. Now the formal window is open, and it closes fast.
For cloud providers, SaaS companies, AI firms, and the primes and subs that deliver technology-enabled services, the arithmetic is simple: file specific comments by October 19 or watch the legacy players who've been filing for years shape the rules alone.
Published ·Deep Fathom