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FAR cuts 3,000 mandates as procurement chief tells agencies: use discretion

The 3,000-cut tally gets the headlines, but the operational shift from "find the rule that permits it" to "find the rule that forbids it" is what changes Monday morning.

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TL;DR

The White House's FAR overhaul has removed roughly 3,000 non-statutory mandates and cut the regulation by about 25%, OFPP Administrator Kevin Rhodes said Thursday at Carahsoft's FedRAMP Summit. The slimmed-down rulebook flips the default posture of federal procurement: if the FAR doesn't say you can't do something, contracting officers should consider it. The shift from compliance-checklist buying to delivery-focused acquisition will take years. "Five years from now," Rhodes said, "we're going to have people that are executing and delivering on the mission."

The Office of Federal Procurement Policy's rewrite of the Federal Acquisition Regulation has stripped roughly 3,000 requirements not tied to statute and reduced the rulebook by about a quarter, OFPP Administrator Kevin Rhodes said Thursday at Carahsoft's FedRAMP Summit in Washington, D.C.

"If it's not in the FAR, and it doesn't tell you you can't do it, then you should consider it," Rhodes said. The goal, he added, is for contracting officers to focus on delivery rather than compliance checklists, working alongside industry partners to identify the most effective approach for each acquisition.

The overhaul stems from Executive Order 14275, signed in April 2025, which directed OFPP to strip the FAR to provisions "required by statute or essential to sound procurement." OMB formally launched the effort in August 2025, and the FAR Council has since issued model deviation text for multiple parts of the regulation. Two sections (parts 38 and 51) have been retired entirely and folded into a central section on information and supply chain security.

Rhodes acknowledged the culture change won't happen overnight. "Five years from now," he said, "we're going to have people that are executing and delivering on the mission."

Published ·Deep Fathom