On July 21, 2026, Don Acquisition LLC, a California-based provider of federal acquisition training, filed a pre-award bid protest in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims challenging how the General Services Administration has pushed the “Revolutionary FAR Overhaul” (RFO) into the Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) program. Don Acquisition LLC v. United States, No. 26-1039 (Fed. Cl.). The complaint is a direct challenge to the government’s “deviation now, rulemaking later” approach to rewriting the FAR.

Executive Order 14275, issued April 15, 2025, directed the FAR Council to strip the FAR down to provisions required by statute or otherwise essential. Rather than proceeding through ordinary notice-and-comment rulemaking, the Office of Management and Budget laid out a two-phase process: the FAR Council releases “model deviation text” on a rolling basis, agencies immediately adopt that text through class deviations, and formal rulemaking follows later. Public feedback is accepted informally during the deviation phase, but the FAR Council has said it will not formally respond to comments until the rulemaking stage. Agencies, including GSA, have adopted the model deviations largely verbatim, and in June 2026 the FAR Council released its first set of proposed rules, which, notably, do not track the deviation text in every respect.

GSA has implemented the RFO in the MAS program through successive refreshes to the consolidated MAS solicitation, issued in November 2025, April 2026, and June 2026. Together, those refreshes added, revised, and deleted dozens of FAR clauses and provisions, and each was applied to existing Schedule contracts through a mass modification.

Don Acquisition’s central claim is procedural: under 41 U.S.C. § 1707, procurement policies and regulations that have a significant effect beyond an agency’s internal operations or impose a significant cost on contractors may not take effect until they have gone through publication and public comment. The complaint alleges that neither the FAR Council nor GSA published the RFO deviations for comment before they took effect.

Why This Matters for Native-Owned Contractors

The RFO refreshes have been applied to existing contracts through mass modifications with acceptance deadlines, and the FAR Council’s June 2026 proposed rules diverge in places from the deviation text contractors have already accepted. Contractors are being asked to redesign compliance programs, proposals, and, in some cases, their offerings themselves to match “current” requirements that can change again at a moment’s notice.

If the court agrees that the RFO deviations were unlawfully promulgated, GSA could be required to reissue solicitation terms and potentially unwind or reprocess mass modifications, meaning terms contractors have already accepted, and systems they have already built, may rest on requirements a court has set aside. A ruling for the government, on the other hand, would effectively bless the deviation-first model and signal that challenges to RFO implementation in other agencies’ solicitations face a steep climb. Either outcome will shape how much process contractors can expect as the remaining RFO parts move through rulemaking.

This article summarizes aspects of the law and does not constitute legal advice. For legal advice with regard to your situation, you should contact an attorney.