Rewriting the Rules of Government Acquisition for Innovation
41 years old. 2,600+ pages. 53 Parts. What do these numbers have in common? They all describe the current Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) (s’ouvre dans un nouvel onglet), the comprehensive regulatory framework used by the U.S. government to buy goods, services, and solutions. The FAR, combined with individual agency supplemental regulations, policies, and procedures, reflects a decades-old corpus of statutory requirements, standardized definitions, model acquisition practices, and legal rights and responsibilities for both public and private sector contracting parties.
Here’s another important number: $750 billion. This represents the federal government’s estimated total annual spend on federal contracts, making the U.S. government the largest single purchaser of private sector offerings in the world.
Finally, a date: September 30, 2025. This is the widely publicized deadline for the FAR Council to complete its “Revolutionary FAR Overhaul” (s’ouvre dans un nouvel onglet) initiative—a once-in-a-generation opportunity to review and rewrite the FAR in its entirety to align with streamlined statutory requirements and, hopefully, commercial best practices for ensuring the government wisely invests taxpayer dollars in modern, secure, and scalable technology solutions that meet the government’s mission today and tomorrow.
The General Services Administration (GSA) has largely spearheaded the effort to rewrite the FAR with the goal of promoting “faster acquisitions, greater competition, and better results.” (s’ouvre dans un nouvel onglet) For the commercial information technology (IT) industry, these reforms cannot come soon enough.
Today’s world looks very different from when the FAR was officially implemented in 1984. At that time, the U.S. government spent a large portion of its annual budget on fixed assets such as government-owned buildings and ships. The internet was in its infancy, and the birth of the World Wide Web was still 5 years away. In contrast, modern government missions are increasingly technology-driven, agile, and reliant on innovative commercial software and cloud solutions. Standard contracting processes and regulations have simply not kept pace with the rapid evolution of commercial technologies, which means the government does not fully benefit from the incredible pace of private sector innovation. Instead, government employees use computers and software that are often years behind what they experience at home or in school.
That changes now. Alongside the FAR overhaul, government agencies are making significant updates to contracting vehicles for innovative capabilities like artificial intelligence (AI), with GSA announcing (s’ouvre dans un nouvel onglet) that it has added multiple cutting-edge AI solutions to its Multiple Award Schedule. Notably, this move operationalizes the goals of the Trump Administration’s AI Action Plan by making private sector-developed AI products widely available to all government customers through streamlined acquisition methods. This announcement also follows GSA’s efforts to streamline and consolidate many procurement actions in-house through its OneGov Strategy (s’ouvre dans un nouvel onglet), starting with negotiating multiple major agreements with commercial software providers (s’ouvre dans un nouvel onglet) and extending to other categories of IT.
ITI has provided multiple recommendations for how government IT acquisition can be more efficient, more competitive, and result in greater value for the American taxpayer. Most recently, ITI shared practical recommendations (s’ouvre dans un nouvel onglet) for improving the FAR Council’s model deviation for FAR Part 39: Acquisition of Information and Communications Technology (s’ouvre dans un nouvel onglet). Key recommendations include explicitly requiring the government to buy commercial technologies using commercial terms and conditions, aligning modular contracting processes with how technology is developed in the private sector, and educating and upskilling the government’s acquisition workforce on buying modern IT.
As discussed in ITI’s comments (s’ouvre dans un nouvel onglet), the FAR Council has a significant opportunity through the Revolutionary FAR Overhaul to ensure private sector innovation is available and accessible to federal agencies, on par with innovations offered in the commercial marketplace. The time for reform is now and significant changes are already taking place. The IT industry supports and stands ready to partner with federal agencies to ensure much-needed access to the innovative technologies that benefit all Americans.
Read ITI’s full FAR Part 39 Comments here (s’ouvre dans un nouvel onglet).
Author
