Compliance Stuff

The Federal Acquisition Regulatory Council (FAR Council) released its Spring 2025 regulatory agenda as part of the government-wide  Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions , unveiling a slimmed-down list of procurement rules. In line with the Trump administration’s deregulatory priorities, t he FAR Council dropped several policy-oriented initiatives while maintaining a focus on two rules that strike at the core of procurement and information security — controlled unclassified information (CUI) and organizational conflicts of interest (OCI) . The agenda marks a narrowing compared with the Biden administration’s fall 2024 Unified Agenda, which had included more than 40 FAR-related rules. The Spring 2025 list contains fewer than half that number, reflecting what contractors and practitioners are already describing as the administration’s “one-in, ten-out” regulatory philosophy seen in  Executive Order 14192 . Rules Removed from Agenda Several rules championed by the...

  On October 3, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Inspector General (OIG) published a   strategic plan   for improving oversight of public grants and contracts “to strengthen compliance with HHS award requirements; promote award practices that achieve program outcomes; and mitigate fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement.” This comes as grant fraud related to awards by HHS and other agencies routinely makes the news. For example, in July Janet Mello was   sentenced   to 15 years in prison for stealing over $100 million from a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)/Department of Defense (DoD) grant program aimed at helping military families. Similarly, fraud stemming from the Paycheck Protection Act has been dubbed the “biggest fraud in a generation.” In Fiscal Year (FY) 2023, excluding the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), HHS awarded about 142,000 grants totaling more than $77 billion and over 50,000 contracts amounting t...