An order reinforces requirements of the 1994 FASA Act prioritizing the procurement of commercially available products and services over custom products. Image: Tada Images/Shutterstock.com
By: FEDweek StaffIn separate executive orders, President Trump has ordered a streamlining of the Federal Acquisition Regulation and has reemphasized purchasing of off-the-shelf products and services under the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act.
“Federal procurement under the FAR receives consistently negative assessments regarding its efficiency . . . Fortunately, its inadequacies are self-inflicted and can be remedied through a comprehensive reform of the FAR,” says the first of those orders.
“The current FAR is over 2,000 pages long with nearly 3,000 complex and costly directives for potential vendors. These byzantine regulations have created a bureaucratic maze that stifle innovation, snuff out competition, and drive up costs,” says a White House statement accompanying the order.
“As the world’s largest buyer, spending almost $1 trillion annually on procurement contracts, the federal government should be promoting agility, competition, and results. Instead, our procurement process, after decades of regulatory buildup, does the exact opposite. It benefits ineffective and entrenched vendors who can afford massive compliance costs at the expense of every other potential vendor,” it says.
The order requires the OMB and the FAR Council to rewrite the FAR within 120 days to “ensure that it contains only provisions that are required by statute or that are otherwise necessary to support simplicity and usability, strengthen the efficacy of the procurement system, or protect economic or national security interests.”
Individual agencies are “to ensure agency alignment with FAR reform and to provide recommendations regarding any agency-specific supplemental regulations to the FAR” under guidance to be issued by OMB. That guidance also is to include “new agency supplemental regulations and internal guidance that promote expedited and streamlined acquisitions.”
A separate order reinforces requirements of the 1994 FASA Act prioritizing the procurement of commercially available products and services rather than non-commercial, custom products or services. The order requires agency contracting officers to review within 60 days all pending contracts for non-commercial products or services and submit proposed waivers that “must include market research and price analysis to demonstrate why commercial solutions cannot meet the government’s needs.”
It further tells agencies to submit FASA compliance reports to OMB within 120 days and then annually and requires that waivers for non-commercial procurements must be reviewed and approved or denied in writing.
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