As the federal government rethinks how prescriptive the Federal Acquisition Regulation should be, the General Services Administration is recasting what it expects from its contracting officers: less rote process navigation, more judgment. The shift, described by GSA's Office of Acquisition Policy, Integrity and Workforce, accompanies the Revolutionary FAR Overhaul, the governmentwide effort to pare back one-size-fits-all rules that officials say stifled innovation. With fewer mandates dictating each step of an award, GSA is asking its workforce to exercise more individual discretion, and it is building a new guidance layer — a non-regulatory "FAR Companion" — to help them do it.
Background
The repositioning is a direct consequence of the deregulatory effort the FAR Council has branded the "Revolutionary FAR Overhaul." The animating idea is to reduce the prescriptive, one-size-fits-all mandates that, in GSA's telling, stifled innovation, and to push more decisions onto the professional judgment of the buyers themselves. The common thread is a deliberate move away from rigid process and toward expanded contracting-officer authority.
That design choice changes the job. For years, the FAR functioned in part as a checklist: a contracting officer who followed the prescribed steps and approval thresholds could defend nearly any decision by pointing to the rule that compelled it. Paring back those mandates removes some of that cover. In its place, GSA is asking its acquisition workforce to plan, award, manage, and close out contracts using professional judgment rather than a script. Nick West, director of GSA's Office of Acquisition Policy, Integrity and Workforce, framed the change as a new paradigm for how the agency's buyers operate, noting that "our contracting officers are generally spending a lot of time navigating process instead of focusing on planning."
Key Details
The central tool GSA is leaning on is the "FAR Companion" — non-regulatory guidance designed to help contracting officers navigate the planning, award, management, and closeout phases of a contract. Because the Companion sits outside the regulation itself, it carries interpretive advice rather than command. GSA describes it as consolidating policy that had been scattered across hundreds of different documents, giving officers a single reference point for sound practice while preserving the flexibility the overhaul is trying to create.
GSA is candid that the approach has a downside. More discretion across a large workforce invites inconsistency, with different contracting officers reaching different conclusions on similar buys. West identified training as the agency's primary lever against that risk: "There's always going to be inconsistency. Training is the single best use of trying to reduce that." The logic is that when rules no longer enforce uniformity, a well-trained workforce that shares the same judgment and the same reference materials becomes the mechanism that keeps outcomes from drifting too far apart. That emphasis fits the office's existing remit: it runs GSA's acquisition workforce development, the federal acquisition certification programs, and the Contracting Officer Warrant Program, and it writes and revises the General Services Administration Acquisition Manual.
The shift also lands as the acquisition workforce is shrinking, a trend GSA expects to continue. West has been blunt about the constraint, arguing the agency "can't just ask our folks to do more with less." That makes the FAR Companion and training less a luxury than the connective tissue meant to keep a leaner, more discretionary system functioning.
The reform also relocates risk inside the acquisition process. When prescriptive mandates fall away, more of a contract's protection depends on how the requirement is written and how the solicitation is structured up front. A poorly scoped requirement or a loosely drafted solicitation no longer gets backstopped by a long list of compelled terms. That raises the stakes at the front end of the buy, for both the agency writing the requirement and the contractor responding to it, because the document the parties negotiate is increasingly the document that governs.
What It Means for Contractors
For contractors, the practical effect is that the person on the other side of the table now has more room to maneuver — and more responsibility for the result. Decisions that once had a clear regulatory answer may now turn on a contracting officer's reading of the situation, which means relationships, clear communication, and a well-documented proposal matter more than they did under the old clause-driven regime. The same buy handled by two different officers could go two different ways, and the FAR Companion's guidance, rather than a binding rule, may be what shapes the call.
Contractors should pay closer attention to how requirements and solicitations are written, because that language increasingly carries the weight the deleted mandates used to bear. Ambiguities that a prescriptive rule would have resolved may now sit unaddressed unless a party raises them, so reading solicitations carefully and asking questions during the pre-award phase becomes more valuable. Engaging early, before requirements harden, gives contractors a chance to influence buys they might previously have inherited fully formed.
The inconsistency GSA is openly worried about is also a contractor risk. A protest or a dispute may hinge on an individual officer's discretionary judgment rather than a bright-line rule, which can cut either way and is harder to predict. Contractors should document their interactions and the basis for award decisions where they can, both to protect themselves and to create a record if a decision is later challenged. As GSA invests in training to narrow the variance, contractors will be watching whether the agency's buyers actually converge on consistent practice or whether the new latitude produces a patchwork of outcomes across the workforce.
