If you have opened a federal solicitation this year and felt like you were reading two rulebooks stapled together, you were not imagining it. Since the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) overhaul began, agencies have been buying under class deviations while the FAR Council works on making the new text official. The result is a generation of solicitations that cite the overhauled FAR in one clause and the old one in the next. Now the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has weighed in, and its answer is one part sympathy and three parts homework.

Continue Reading Not a Model of Clarity: GAO Takes Its First Hard Look at Solicitations That Mix the Old FAR with the New

The Federal Acquisition Regulatory Council’s latest Revolutionary FAR Overhaul proposals include significant changes for federal contractors, including new rules affecting required-use contract vehicles, commercial contracting, source selection, contract types and technical data rights. McCarter Government Contracts & Global Trade partners Franklin C. Turner and Alexander W. Major examine the proposals, identify the changes that matter most for contractors and offer practical takeaways in their recent The Government Contractor article, “Separating the Wheat From the Chaff in the FAR Council’s Fall Harvest.”

Read the article.

Here is a scenario that should keep every proposal manager up at night. You hit “send” on a corrected quote 29 minutes before the contracting officer’s deadline. The agency’s own email security software holds it for 42 minutes and drops it into her inbox 14 minutes late. You win the award anyway. Then the incumbent files a protest, having found the timestamps in the administrative record, and the US Court of Federal Claims (COFC) takes the award away. That is what happened in FYI-For Your Information, Inc. v. United States, No. 26-cv-0032 (Fed. Cl. Aug. 24, 2026), and the lesson is blunt. Late is late, even when the Government’s own server is the reason.

Continue Reading Held at the Gate: COFC Enjoins a DEA Award Because the Agency’s Own Email Filter Made the Winner’s Corrected Quote Late

Every driver knows the sound a missed exit makes. Silence, then 14 minutes of profane commentary. It is worse in October, when the ridgeline is on fire with color and the next turnaround is 11 miles out.

On September 1, 2026, the Cost Accounting Standards (CAS) Board (Board) published two final rules, 91 Fed. Reg. 56056 and 91 Fed. Reg. 56061. Both take effect October 1, 2026, and together they build contractors an off-ramp out of CAS. It is unmarked, and for existing contracts it does not open until your next full cost accounting period. Is your blinker on? Should it be?

Continue Reading Modified Behavior: The CAS Off-Ramp Almost Nobody Is Talking About

Labor Day has a way of sneaking up on the federal market. The fiscal year is closing, the fourth-quarter obligation sprint is in full swing, and most of us are also trying to squeeze one more week out of summer vacation. This year, the Small Business Administration (SBA) used the last stretch of summer to publish something that deserves your attention before the beach chairs go back in the garage. Its proposal would change who counts as small in nearly every industry that sells to the Government, and the comment window closes two weeks after Labor Day.

Continue Reading Small Is About to Get a Lot Bigger: SBA Proposes to Rewrite the Size Standards for Nearly Every Industry That Sells to the Government

The proposed rule is now history. On August 11, 2026, the Small Business Administration (SBA) published its final rule, Reforms to 13 CFR 124.103 To Remove SBA’s 8(a) Program’s Rebuttable Presumption of Social Disadvantage for Individually Owned Firms Only, 91 Fed. Reg. 51568 (Aug. 11, 2026) (the Rule). The Rule takes effect September 10, 2026, and by its own terms applies to all pending applications of individually-owned applicants as of that date. A firm with an application sitting in the queue will therefore be measured against a test that did not exist when it applied.

Continue Reading Prove the Policy, Not the Story: SBA’s Final Rule Rewrites the 8(a) Social Disadvantage Test

I’m totally aging myself (due to reruns) but The Jetsons (created by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera (1962-63)), promised us a future where you pushed a button and the “Food-a-Rac-a-Cycle,” a machine, made whatever you wanted. Dinner. Clothes. Maybe an off-brand Spacely sprocket or two. Additive manufacturing has gotten us remarkably close. Give a 3D printer the right digital file, the right material, and the right process parameters, and out comes the part. George Jetson would recognize the concept immediately. What George did not have was the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS).

Continue Reading Meet George Jetson’s Government Contractor: 3D Printing, CUI, and Who Owns the Recipe

Two proposals rated Exceptional. Two past performance ratings of Substantial Confidence. A price gap of nearly $15 million between the two offerors. On that record, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) did what source selection authorities routinely do. It declared the offerors essentially equal on the non-price factors and awarded to the lower-priced firm. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) sustained the disappointed offeror’s protest, because the past performance findings that made the two firms look equivalent could not bear the weight the agency placed on them. The case is Veros Real Estate Solutions, LLC, B-423965.2, B-423965.3, B-423965.4 (Comp. Gen. July 22, 2026), and it carries an outsize practical lesson: An agency may not credit an offeror with work the offeror did not perform, and it may not paper over a relevancy determination with conclusory adjectives. For contractors competing in best value procurements where technical ratings bunch at the top, the holding warrants close study.

Continue Reading Credit Where Credit Isn’t Due: GAO Sustains Protest Where VA Credited the Awardee for the Government’s Own Work

On July 13, 2026, the Department of Defense (DoD) announced the immediate suspension of the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) Phase 2, which had been scheduled to take effect on November 10, 2026. Phase 2 would have made third-party assessment organization (C3PAO) certification at CMMC Level 2 a condition of award for applicable contracts involving controlled unclassified information (CUI). The suspension is broader than the headline suggests. Phases 3 and 4 and all future implementation milestones are frozen until further notice.

Before you pause your compliance spend, ask the right questions:

  • With no third-party assessor, whose signature now carries the legal risk? Yours.
  • Does your prime contract care what the Pentagon announced? No, and it still binds you.
  • That gap assessment in your files documenting your shortfalls? It did not evaporate.
  • Why a memo instead of a regulation? Because a memo can be reversed just as fast.

A new CMMC Reform Task Force, reporting to the DoD Chief Information Officer (CIO), will review the program and report within 60 days, drawing on responses to a public request for information due August 14, 2026. DoD’s CIO stated that Small Business Administration data suggest future CMMC phases could cost small and midsize businesses more than $7 billion annually. Expectations are also misaligned due to an assessor shortage, with more than 100,000 companies needing assessments and roughly 100 authorized C3PAOs. Officials declined to rule out ending the program entirely, and the Cyber AB was not told before the announcement.

Continue Reading DoD Suspends CMMC Phase 2. What Happened, What It Means, and What Nobody Is Telling You

Peak summer travel season has jet fuel moving by the millions of gallons, so there is a certain irony in a fuel-supply dispute that turned on an email no one at the agency ever opened. A contractor sent its proposal a day early, got an automated message saying the email was delivered, and lost the competition anyway. The agency never saw the bid. That is the short version of Rick Aviation, Inc. v. United States, No. 25-1604 (Fed. Cl. June 17, 2026), a post-award protest recently decided at the Court of Federal Claims. The opinion is a useful—and painful—refresher on what “received” actually means under the Federal Acquisition Regulation and on how little sympathy a court will extend when the offeror caused the problem.

Continue Reading Grounded Before Takeoff: A Cautionary Tale on the “Late-Is-Late” Rule