# Federal Acquisition Regulation The uniform body of regulation governing how executive agencies buy goods and services. It binds the whole executive branch, which is why a rule written into it reaches every agency at once, and it is maintained jointly by the Department of Defense, the General Services Administration and NASA under the policy direction of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy. Changes are issued as numbered circulars and published in the Federal Register; agencies layer their own supplements on top of it. Its parts cover the whole lifecycle of a federal purchase, and one of them — Subpart 9.4 — holds the machinery for cutting a company off from federal work entirely, mapped at [[How a Federal Contractor Is Suspended and Debarred]]. Since 2025 the regulation has been undergoing a government-wide rewrite intended to shorten and simplify it part by part. The rewrite has proceeded in an unusual sequence: agencies have operated under deviation texts while the formal rules were still proposed, which means the version a contractor is actually governed by in a given case may not be the codified text. The proposal covering Part 9 was published in September 2026 and states that its changes to that part are not intended to alter policy or procedure, while separately adding a new cause for suspension and debarment. ## See also - [[How a Federal Contractor Is Suspended and Debarred]] - [[GSA]] - [[Present Responsibility]]