Gordon Rees Scully Mansukhani presents the latest insights from our Government Contracts group, offering a comprehensive overview of recent significant decisions, regulatory changes, and essential updates for businesses contracting with federal and state governments. Our team compiled the most pertinent legal developments to keep you informed in the dynamic landscape of government contracts.
Tune in to The Essential GovCon Brief podcast on Spotify or YouTube for an in-depth discussion of the issues highlighted here.
Agency Update
Revolutionary FAR Overhaul
The Revolutionary FAR Overhaul (RFO), the first comprehensive restructuring of the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), continues to advance. Its goals include returning the FAR to its statutory core, rewriting provisions in plain language, and eliminating burdensome, non-statutory rules.
What’s New Under FAR Overhaul
As the multi-year FAR overhaul continues its rollout, agencies are now operating in an early implementation phase marked by class deviations, revised clause structures, and substantial rewrites that attempt to express procurement requirements in “plain language.”
Class deviations are agency-wide authorizations that allow contracting officers to deviate from the existing FAR when a replacement provision or clause is being tested ahead of formal rulemaking. In short, they allow agencies to apply the “new” FAR text even though the FAR itself has not yet been fully amended.
November 3, 2025, marked a key transition point: public-comment windows for major blocks of model deviation text closed, and agencies received authorization to use a new wave of class deviations in upcoming procurements. As a result, agencies began incorporating large portions of the revised FAR text into new solicitations through these class deviations. Meanwhile, many non-statutory requirements that were removed or simplified are being retired or moved into non-regulatory “buying guides” and related resources, which provide best practices and procedural guidance without the force of regulation. Together with the streamlined FAR, these non-regulatory resources form the Strategic Acquisition Guidance (SAG) framework.
Implementation remains uneven, creating a patchwork landscape in which some procurements follow the legacy FAR, others rely on deviation text, and others incorporate newly rewritten provisions. This transitional environment increases compliance risk: contractors must confirm which version of the FAR governs each solicitation, award, and flow-down. The coming formal rulemaking phase will determine which revisions become permanent, including provisions subject to sunset clauses.
The Path Ahead
The class-deviation phase is an interim step. After model deviation text has been issued for all parts, the FAR Council will undertake formal notice-and-comment rulemaking, informed by public input on the RFO website, agency experience with deviations, and testing of the SAG resources.
Non-statutory provisions that remain in the streamlined FAR are now subject to a four-year regulatory sunset, creating some uncertainty about which non-statutory requirements will be renewed, further revised, or allowed to lapse during the rulemaking phase.
Contractors should review templates, flow-downs, compliance procedures, and subcontractor documentation to account for simultaneous legacy and revised regimes.
Attorneys and contract managers should monitor agency-by-agency adoption patterns, update internal guidance, and prepare for continued adjustments as the overhaul evolves.
Recent Cases/Decisions
GAO Sustains Protest Over Unaddressed Impaired-Objectivity OCI at FEC
In Castro & Company, LLC, B-423689 (Nov. 13, 2025), the Government Accountability Office (GAO) sustained a protest after finding that the Federal Election Commission (FEC) failed to reasonably consider or document a significant impaired-objectivity organizational conflict of interest (OCI) involving the awardee. The awardee was simultaneously performing an acquisition-support contract for the same office overseeing this procurement, placing it near the agency’s decision-making processes.
Although the agency acknowledged the potential conflict, it produced no contemporaneous analysis, documentation, or mitigation. GAO found the absence of such documentation unreasonable.
GAO also concluded that the agency’s technical evaluation lacked support and that its best-value tradeoff was inadequately documented, particularly where the contracting officer failed to meaningfully compare Castro’s lower-priced quotation.
GAO recommended that the agency meaningfully investigate and document the OCI, reevaluate quotations, and issue a new source-selection decision.
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