Friends, Romans, contractors, lend me your ears;
I come to disclose your owners, not to debar them.
The FOCI that contractors do is oft assessed;
The clearances are oft interred with their bones.
So let it be with allies. The honorable rule
Hath told you that we treat all foreigners alike;
If it be so, it is a grievous form,
And grievously hath the SF-328 answered it.

The speech may be a little ridiculous, but in its way, it’s also a little accurate. The proposed DFARS rule implementing Section 847 of the FY 2020 NDAA is not unkind to allies. It is, as was Mark Antony, scrupulously polite to them, right up to the moment it asks them to register as suspects.

Continue Reading Friends, Romans, Suspects: Section 847 and the Permanent FOCI Era

Half an inch.

That is what stood between a health care contractor and a slice of a $260 million Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) procurement. Not a missed deadline, not a small-business misstep, not a price gaffe—half an inch on a hospital-bed frame. In Joerns Healthcare, LLC v. United States, No. 25-1688 (Fed. Cl. Apr. 28, 2026), the US Court of Federal Claims (COFC) made clear that it does not particularly care that the rest of the industry rounds the same way the protester did. If the solicitation specifies 36 and 42 inches as the applicable requirements and announces that the agency will bring a tape measure to verify the readings, the agency means 36 and 42 inches—and it means it with a tape measure.

For any contractor that has ever shrugged off a solicitation requirement because “the market doesn’t really build it that way,” Joerns provides a teachable moment.

Continue Reading Half an Inch from a Quarter-Billion: COFC Tells Contractors to Read the Spec, Not the Industry

The Administration’s New Procurement Default and the Contractor’s Playbook

On April 30, 2026, President Donald Trump signed Promoting Efficiency, Accountability, and Performance in Federal Contracting, an executive order (EO) that rewires the default of federal procurement. Going forward, fixed-price contracting is the default. Cost-reimbursement, time-and-material (T&M), and labor-hour vehicles still exist, but contracting officers must justify them in writing, and agency-head approval kicks in at dollar thresholds that bite hardest outside the Department of War.

The political framing is familiar: “bloated overhead” and runaway consulting spend (the EO pegs FY 2024 cost-reimbursement consulting obligations at roughly $120 billion). The legal architecture is more interesting than the rhetoric. For contractors carrying significant cost-type, T&M, or labor-hour backlog, the day-one impact is real and asymmetric.

Continue Reading Cost-Plus Out. Fixed-Price In.

If your supply chain crosses a border, your FAR 52.222-90 flowdown is probably already wrong. Either it overpromises in ways an EU, UK, or South African supplier cannot sign without violating local law, or it underpromises and creates False Claims Act (FCA) exposure on the US side. Both versions of the problem land on the same desk, and they land on a clock.

As we covered in a prior post, FAR 52.222-90 is not a routine flowdown. It reaches subcontract administration, records access, reporting obligations, bilateral modifications, suspension and debarment, and FCA materiality. In cross-border scenarios, those same hooks meet a thicket of foreign equality, pay-transparency, sustainability, human-rights, privacy, and disclosure-blocking regimes. The result is predictable confusion, and confusion in this clause is expensive.

Continue Reading FAR 52.222-90 Goes Global: Cross-Border Supply Chains and the Limits of a US Flowdown

Federal contractors looking for the “DEI issue” in FAR 52.222-90 may be looking in the wrong place. Yes, the clause is about what Executive Order 14398 calls “racially discriminatory DEI activities.” But that’s only the starting point. The new clause also reaches subcontract flowdowns, records access, reporting obligations, bilateral modifications, suspension and debarment, and False Claims Act (FCA) risk. This isn’t just an HR issue, and it isn’t just a DEI issue. It is a contract-administration issue, a supply-chain issue, and an invoice issue all at once.

Continue Reading Everything Everywhere All at Once: The Contractor DEI Clause Hits HR, Supply Chains, Invoices, and Subcontracts

On April 7, 2026, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche issued a memorandum establishing the National Fraud Enforcement Division (“NFED”) within the U.S. Department of Justice (“DOJ”). Announced in a corresponding DOJ press release, the NFED is the Department’s first unified litigating division dedicated exclusively to investigating and prosecuting fraud against taxpayer dollars. For the government contractor community, the creation of the NFED represents a meaningful escalation in federal fraud enforcement.

Continue Reading DOJ Stands Up a New Fraud-Fighting Division: What Government Contractors Need to Know About the National Fraud Enforcement Division

Given recent world events and their attendant economic shocks, 2026 looks to be another year of supply chain gyration. Government contractors, besides having to cope with such shocks, must add semiconductors to the list of supply chain concerns. Semiconductors, as the U.S. Government states in a new proposed rule (2026-03065 (91 FR 7223)), are the “tiny electronic devices” essential to “consumer electronics, automobiles, data centers, critical infrastructure, and virtually all military systems.” Indeed, semiconductors “power tools as simple as a power adapter and as complex as a fighter jet or a smartphone. They are also essential building blocks of the technologies that will shape our future, including artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and clean energy.”

Continue Reading Semiconductors: Another Link to Ever-Extending Curation of the Federal Supply Chain

Clear and precise recognition and treatment of intellectual property (IP) are critical in government contracting because the ownership and use of preexisting IP, so-called “Background IP,” turn on the timing of, and funding sources for, the development of the IP. Therefore, internal documentation and standardized procedures for tracking and marking IP are crucial in the event of a dispute regarding the development, use, or ownership of IP before, during, and after performance on a government contract.

Continue Reading Don’t Put Your Background IP into It: Protecting What’s Yours

A contracting officer issues a solicitation amendment on a Friday afternoon, reverses course by Friday evening and demands a revised quotation by noon on Saturday, then changes the requirements again on both Sunday and Monday with a response window of as little as one hour. The agency’s own suggested solution? Ordering a refrigerator manufactured in Turkey, not available for purchase in the United States. If this sounds like a procurement that went off the rails, the GAO agrees.

Continue Reading When “Reasonable” Means More Than a Weekend: GAO Sustains Protest Over Compressed Response Times

The biggest danger may be misreading the order—and creating new exposure in the process.

On March 26, 2026, President Trump issued an executive order (EO) titled “Addressing DEI Discrimination by Federal Contractors.” Read at the headline level, the order can sound like another broad anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) pronouncement. Read as a procurement directive, however, it is something more concrete and more consequential: a command to federal agencies to begin inserting a mandatory clause into covered contracts and contract-like instruments, including subcontracts and lower-tier subcontracts, within 30 days. That shift, from messaging to mechanics, is the real story.

Continue Reading Beyond the Headlines: The Real Contractor Risks in the New DEI Executive Order