The Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) said it supports an executive order from President Donald Trump that would overhaul the federal purchasing process.
“The Aerospace Industries Association has long called for changes to be made to the process by which the Department of Defense acquires and fields equipment and technology — to accelerate the system, to reduce costs, and to strengthen the entire defense industrial base,” AIA President and CEO Eric Fanning said in a statement. “Bold moves to overhaul the entire federal acquisition regulation, or FAR, show that this administration is serious about eliminating bureaucracy and unnecessary regulations. AIA applauds this initiative and looks forward to partnering with the administration to identify ways to streamline and simplify the process.”
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump signed the executive order that would reshape Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR).
The order, Restoring Common Sense to Federal Procurement, calls for the FAR to include only those “provisions required by statute or essential to sound procurement, and any FAR provisions that do not advance these objectives should be removed.”
“More than 40 years ago, the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) was implemented to establish uniform procedures for acquisitions across executive departments and agencies,” Trump wrote in the EO. “The ‘vision’ of the federal acquisition system, codified at section 1.102 of the FAR, is to ‘deliver on a timely basis the best value product or service to the customer, while maintaining the public’s trust and fulfilling public policy objectives[,]’ but since its inception, the FAR has swelled to more than 2,000 pages of regulations, evolving into an excessive and overcomplicated regulatory framework and resulting in an onerous bureaucracy. Federal procurement under the FAR receives consistently negative assessments regarding its efficiency.”