The Defense Department has given contracting officers a formal playbook for buying big-ticket weapons and services without demanding the full stack of certified cost data that has governed large sole-source deals for decades. On July 8, 2026, the Defense Pricing, Contracting and Acquisition Policy (DPCAP) office issued a preview Version 1.0 of the "TINA Lite" Policy and Implementation Guide, the first workforce-facing manual for a tailored pricing authority that Congress made permanent in the FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act. The guide tells acquisition teams how to lean on a contractor's historical actual costs from prior work instead of collecting a complete certified cost-or-pricing data package on eligible deals worth more than $50 million.
Background
For more than half a century, the Truth in Negotiations Act — now renamed the Truthful Cost or Pricing Data statute — has forced contractors to certify detailed cost and pricing data on large sole-source awards where the government lacks competition to discipline the price. The certification carries real exposure: if the data turns out to be inaccurate, incomplete, or out of date, the government can claw back the difference through a defective pricing adjustment. Compiling that package is one of the most labor-intensive parts of winning a major non-competitive contract, and it slows negotiations on both sides of the table.
"TINA Lite" is the shorthand DPCAP uses for a tailored application of that same authority. Rather than waive the requirement, it lets a contracting officer scale the type and extent of certified data to what a specific buy actually needs, drawing on documented actual costs from prior relevant acquisitions to establish that a proposed price is reasonable. The concept began as a pilot under Section 890 of the FY2019 NDAA, aimed at contract actions above $50 million. Section 812(c) of the FY2026 NDAA converted the pilot into a permanent authority — the "Program to Accelerate Contracting and Pricing Processes," codified at 10 U.S.C. Section 3709.
DPCAP sits within the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Acquisition and Sustainment. It built the guide through a working group that pulled in the military departments, the Defense Contract Audit Agency, and the Defense Contract Management Agency, folding in lessons learned from the pilot years before the authority became permanent. That pedigree matters: the two agencies that audit and administer defense contracts helped shape the same tailored path they will later police, which signals that the government intends the approach to survive audit rather than become a shortcut auditors distrust.
Key Details
The Version 1.0 guide is a preview aimed squarely at the acquisition workforce, and it walks contracting teams through the mechanics of standing up a TINA Lite acquisition. It covers the planning and approval process a contracting officer must clear before tailoring data requirements, the way an RFP should be structured to signal and capture those tailored requirements, and the method for evaluating a contractor's historical actual cost data to support a price reasonableness determination. Each of those pieces maps to a decision point where large sole-source negotiations have historically bogged down, and the guide gives the workforce a common reference for handling them consistently across the services.
The document draws one line in bold. As DPCAP puts it, "TINA Lite is not a waiver of existing requirements but a tailored approach to certified cost or pricing data submissions." In practice that means the certification obligation and the government's defective-pricing remedies do not disappear; the contracting officer instead narrows what data the contractor certifies to, keying it to the historical actuals that already exist from comparable prior buys. A program office repurchasing a subsystem it has bought before, for example, can build its price reasonableness case on what that item actually cost across earlier lots rather than reassembling a full forward-pricing proposal from scratch.
The guide is explicitly a bridge. DPCAP has said it will issue a Version 1.1 once the corresponding Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement changes take effect, aligning the manual with the regulatory text that will formally implement Section 812(c). Until that regulatory implementation lands, Version 1.0 gives the workforce a policy framework to begin planning eligible acquisitions while the DFARS catches up.
What It Means for Contractors
For companies that sell major systems, sustainment, and services to the Defense Department on a sole-source basis, TINA Lite reshapes the paperwork burden on the largest deals — the ones above the $50 million threshold where certified cost-or-pricing data has historically been unavoidable. Contractors with a clean, well-documented cost history on prior lots of the same or similar work stand to benefit most, because that history becomes the currency of the price reasonableness case. Firms that keep disciplined, auditable records of actual costs will be positioned to move faster through negotiations than those that cannot readily produce comparable prior-buy data.
The relief is real but bounded. Because the authority tailors rather than waives the certified-data requirement, the accuracy stakes remain. A contractor still certifies to the data it does submit, and DCAA and DCMA — both of which helped write the guide — remain in the loop on how historical actuals get evaluated. Companies should not read TINA Lite as a loosening of audit scrutiny so much as a redirection of it toward the quality and relevance of their historical cost records. Sloppy or non-comparable data will not clear a price reasonableness determination any faster than a full proposal would.
Contractors should also watch the regulatory calendar. Version 1.0 is a preview built on statutory authority, but the binding contract terms will flow from the forthcoming DFARS changes and the Version 1.1 guide that follows them. Business development and pricing teams pursuing eligible awards now can use the Version 1.0 framework to shape proposals and cost-data strategy, but should expect the specifics to firm up once the regulation is final. Early movers on eligible programs will help set the practical expectations that later buys inherit, and the workforce that plans acquisitions under the preview now will be the first to test how far the tailored path can be pushed in real negotiations.
