The FAR overhaul enters rulemaking — and it changes real thresholds

The federal acquisition system is being rewritten in public. The FAR Council's four proposed rules — the formal rulemaking phase of the overhaul launched by the April 2025 executive order on federal procurement, styled the “Revolutionary FAR Overhaul” — cover roughly 20 FAR parts, and the public comment window closes July 23. Per the Federal Register notices and analyses from Pillsbury and Hunton, a final rule is expected before the end of 2026.

Most of the text removes accumulated sediment: obsolete A-76 provisions, leftover Recovery Act clauses, duplicative certifications. But one change carries real operational weight — contracting officers at DoD, NASA, and the Coast Guard would gain authority to approve sole-source awards up to $100 million without the higher-level justification previously required.

Speed is the point. Paired with the SPEED Act reforms enacted in the FY2026 NDAA, the overhaul aims at an acquisition system that moves at the pace programs need. The trade is that fewer procedural checkpoints shift the burden of judgment onto the people making and winning awards.

• For agencies, a $100 million sole-source ceiling concentrates decision authority — and concentrates the value of knowing exactly who a vendor is, who owns it, and what it depends on.
• For contractors, faster cycles reward teams whose compliance posture, ownership disclosures, and past-performance records are current before the opportunity appears, not assembled after.
• For competitors, fewer protests-by-paperwork means market intelligence and early positioning matter more than procedural leverage.

There is a counterintelligence angle worth naming plainly. A faster acquisition system is also a faster path for supply-chain and ownership risk to enter programs — the same months removed from award timelines are months removed from scrutiny timelines. The overhaul makes due-diligence velocity a mission capability: vetting that once had a year to complete now has a quarter.

Continuous vendor and supply-chain vetting — screening that runs all the time rather than at award — is how programs keep diligence at the new speed. That is the model our platform is built around, and the acquisition system is now moving toward the tempo that requires it.