GSA set to begin its rulemaking push for the FAR overhaul

Despite a delay during the government shutdown, the General Services Administration is moving full steam ahead on its overhaul of the Federal Acquisition Regulation.

The agency completed what Jeff Koses, GSA’s senior procurement executive, called phase one just before the government shutdown on Sept. 30. GSA removed 486 pages of the FAR, which covered 230,000 words and 114 clauses.

“In giving empowerment to contracting officers and industry, we removed 2,724 must-do type of statements,” Koses said Friday at ACT-IAC’s Imagination Nation event in Washington, D.C.

The Revolutionary FAR Overhaul's cuts and rewrites kicked off in April after President Trump signed an executive order mandating a rewrite of the FAR with a 180-day deadline.

Koses said there are seven goals for the overhaul: reduce regulation, reduce costs, reduce administrative costs, reduce price, save time, move faster, drive towards commercial solutions, drive towards fixed-price contracts, and reduce bid protests.

“We tried to keep those seven things in mind in the drafting process,” he said.

During phase one, GSA issued 49 master deviations to make the changes.

But deviations do not codify the changes in the regulations.

“One part of phase two is turning all of this into rulemaking,” Koses said. “Over the next four months you’re going to see us issue a series of proposed rules.”

While the deviation will form the basis of the rules, there will be some changes from the deviations.

“We’ve gotten a lot of good feedback, about 2,000 comments through our process,” he said.

GSA also will use phase two to turn its attention to agency FAR supplements, where individual agencies have added their own rules on top of the FAR. These other rules total the thousands of pages.

GSA has its own FAR supplement that numbers 2,000 pages. The Defense Department has already begun the overhaul of its own DFARS rules.

Even with the rule changes, Koses emphasized that the FAR rewrite needs to focus as much on changing cultures as in rewriting rules.

“We can change rules and regulations, but will people use it? Will they understand it? Will they embrace it,” he said. “Those things are not going to happen if we don’t have a whole cultural change strategy.”

The government contracting ecosystem, which includes buyers and sellers, has spent decades learning to buy and sell in certain ways.

“Tens of thousands of people in government and industry have learned the rulebook, how to operate within it to make things happen,” Koses said. “Now they need to unlearn.”

Changing that culture will take time and effort. There will be communication efforts aimed at government and industry. Training will also be an important element.

“How do you reinforce (to government) a message about being willing to be innovative and try new approaches,” he said.

For industry, Koses recommended that companies provide feedback on how to get better outcomes.

“Out of all acquisition practices I would emphasize those practitioner outcomes. That is what we are looking to train our workforce in,” Koses said. “We need industry at the table. We want you to engage in every aspect of the things that are changing.”