A General Services Administration (GSA) blog post highlights how a recent amendment to the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) has made it easier for Federal agencies to acquire IT through GSA.
GSA, along with the Defense Department (DoD) and NASA, issued a final FAR rule amendment that came into effect June 5. With the change in the FAR rule, GSA said it is looking to reduce the number of steps agencies must take to use its IT Schedule 70, government-wide acquisition contracts (GWACs), or assisted acquisition solutions that help fulfill IT procurement needs.
More specifically, the rule change includes:
- “removing the requirement to justify the best procurement approach if issuing orders against contracts under the GSA Schedules Program such as IT Schedule 70, or through GWACs such as 8(a) STARS 2 and Alliant 2; and”
- “removing the requirement to justify the best procurement approach if using GSA for assisted acquisitions.”
GSA, DoD, and NASA made the amendment by using section 875 of the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to amend section 865 of the Duncan Hunter NDAA for fiscal year 2019, GSA said.