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Good Afternoon. The FAR amendments that turn the fixed-price preference into permanent regulation are due Friday. Kevin Rhodes, the official who owes them, leaves federal service the following Friday. There is no proposed rule.
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🎯 THE SIGNAL
Section 3(b) of Executive Order 14402 gave the Administrator for Federal Procurement Policy 120 days to propose FAR amendments to the FAR Council, which puts the deadline on Friday, August 28. The FAR Council published a batch of proposed rules on June 23 covering 20 parts of the FAR. Part 16, which governs contract types, was not among them.
It had been sequenced into a later batch with Parts 8, 12, 13, 15, and 19, and that batch has not appeared yet.
No EO 14402 case appears in the Council's Open FAR Cases report, which it updates weekly. Federal News Network reported last week that Rhodes leaves on September 4 with no acting successor named.
The overhaul runs in two phases. Phase I put temporary deviation text into the field to see how it worked, and Phase II is the notice-and-comment rulemaking under 41 U.S.C. 1707 that makes the text stick. Fixed-price is still sitting in Phase I.
What governs your next cost-type justification is deviation text for Part 16, posted in late June, which the government can rewrite without publishing a word about it in the Federal Register.
Timeline of EO 14402 deadlines. April 30, order signed. July 15, DoD class deviation issued, met. July 29, top-ten contract reviews due to OMB, met. August 28, FAR amendments due from OFPP, no rule filed. July 2027, justifications due on legacy contracts.
That has not softened anything. The deviation still requires the agency head to sign a written justification before a covered contract is used, at $100M for the Department of War and $10M at most civilian agencies, and it applies to existing contracts with 18 months or more of remaining performance. Hybrid awards get measured on the non-fixed-price portion rather than the headline value.
A slipped rulemaking changes none of it.
Development | What It Means for You |
|---|---|
Part 16 deferred to an unpublished later batch | Plan on deviation text as your operative rulebook through FY2027. Cite the deviation, not the FAR, in your compliance matrices. |
Rhodes departs September 4, no successor named | Answers on deviation interpretation will get slower. Get anything ambiguous resolved with your contracting officer in writing now. |
Notice-and-comment still ahead, whenever it starts | Industry has not had a comment window on the fixed-price text. When one opens, that is your shot at the permanent language. |
The rules governing your contract type can be rewritten without a Federal Register notice, and the office that writes them is losing its chief on September 4.
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💰MONEY MOVES
All four from the August 21 contract list.
Seven carriers split a $1.2B fixed-price, multiple-award IDIQ for short-term dry cargo charter support for TRANSCOM strategic sealift, with a $2.7B ceiling. Performance starts September 1 and runs five years. One of the seven, Waterman Transport, is headquartered in Mobile.
Corvid Technologies took $33.9M for a weapon sled assembly for NMESIS, sole-source under FAR 6.302-1, on a contract that mixes firm-fixed-price, cost-plus-fixed-fee, and cost-reimbursement line items. Hybrids like this are where the justification thresholds actually get tested, since only the non-fixed-price portion counts.
Riptide Technology won $27.7M cost-plus-fixed-fee for NRL work on space and ground C4ISR, competed as a small-business set-aside with five offers. New cost-plus awards are still going out four months after the fixed-price order.
QinetiQ North America did not, in fact, receive the $36.4M robotics sustainment contract announced on August 20. The Army published a correction the next day, stating that the award was never made.
📡OPPORTUNITY RADAR
JWCC Unified Cloud Marketplace (DISA)
What they want: a successor to the $9B JWCC, built in three tiers. Tier 1 keeps the hyperscalers, Tier 2 opens to software, platform, and non-hyperscale infrastructure, and Tier 3 is set aside for commercial innovators and small businesses.
Who should care: cloud, SaaS and managed-services vendors; the four-hyperscaler structure locked out. Read the incumbent numbers first. Task orders on the current vehicle have run about $526M to AWS and about $36M to Google.
Response deadline: the final solicitation was scheduled for August 24. Confirm on SAM.gov.
CMMC Reform Task Force report (DoW CIO)
The RFI closed August 14, and the report goes to the CIO around September 13.
Who should care: anyone holding CUI. Phase 2 third-party certification is suspended, but DFARS 252.204-7012, NIST 800-171, and your SPRS score are all still enforceable, as is False Claims Act exposure.
What to do: hold your Phase 1 posture. A suspension memo is not a repeal, and standing down an assessment program on the strength of one is how companies end up with a certification gap and a qui tam problem.
🔗 The RFI notice on SAM.gov, including the seven questions the task force asked
🧭PEOPLE & POSTURE
Kevin Rhodes leaves OFPP on September 4 after eleven months as the first confirmed administrator since 2019, and he led the first FAR overhaul in forty years. Federal CIO Greg Barbaccia goes four days earlier. That leaves OMB without permanent leadership in technology, acquisition, and financial management, and the controller's seat has been vacant for 9 years. Federal News Network has the details.
DRPM-UxS still has no director. Day 57 since the June 29 memo handed the office directive authority over most unmanned buying.
The Navy stood up its own DRPM for Robotic and Autonomous Systems in mid-August, appointing an acting lead, while keeping the medium USV program on the Navy side. Two direct-reporting offices now split the unmanned portfolio, so which one owns your milestone decision is no longer obvious.
📊READER PULSE
This issue's question. One tap, anonymous, results Thursday.
Have you priced a bid against class deviation text rather than the FAR?
🔮PREDICTIONS
❌ MISSED (July 7): we called for a DRPM-UxS director named by August 15, from outside the traditional acquisition corps. August 15 passed with no name and no interim the Pentagon would confirm. We had reasoned that an office with direct-hire authority and an exemption from the hiring freeze would move quickly on its own leadership, which turned out to be the wrong inference from the right facts.
Resolving Friday (August 13): we called that OFPP would miss the Section 3(b) deadline. It resolves on a published proposed rule or an on-record FAR Council confirmation dated August 28 or earlier. We check the Federal Register and the Open FAR Cases report Friday morning and grade it Thursday.
Both sources are public if you want to check before we do.
Running record: 1–1.
⭐TIP OF THE SPEAR PRO
New report, Friday: The FY2027 CR Survival Guide.
Since fiscal 2000, the Pentagon has started 21 of 27 fiscal years under a continuing resolution or a shutdown. No FY2027 appropriations bill has been enacted; the House stopgap runs through December 4, and the Senate's through December 11, so make it 22 of 28.
The report covers what a CR actually prohibits versus what people believe it prohibits, since those lists are not the same, and the gap costs companies real awards every October. New starts and the anomaly process. Production rate increases.
What happens to a source selection in progress when the fiscal year turns. How option exercises behave when the money is annualized. And a section on writing a proposal schedule that survives a 90-day funding gap, rather than assuming one will not happen.
Free readers get the summary next week. Pro members get all of it Friday morning, plus the archive and the tracker.
THE LAST WORD
If you priced a bid this quarter against deviation text instead of the FAR, I would love to know what you put in the compliance matrix.
Hit reply. Best answers run Thursday, anonymously if you prefer.
Semper Fi,
— Justin