USFCR Blog

If you hold a federal contract or you're planning to bid on one this year, the rules you learned are changing underneath you. Not eventually. Not theoretically. Right now.

The federal government is in the middle of something called the Revolutionary FAR Overhaul. That's the official name. The Federal Acquisition Regulation, the rulebook that governs how the government buys everything, is being rewritten from the ground up. The first wave of changes already took effect on February 1, 2026. More are rolling out every few weeks. And the biggest shifts hit by June 30.

This isn't a minor policy tweak. It's the most significant rewrite of federal buying rules in decades. For small businesses, some of these changes are genuinely good news. Others require immediate attention.

A lot of teams treated 2025 like a warm-up lap. Policies were “final,” but awards didn’t consistently test readiness.

Winter Storm Fern isn’t just a weather story. It’s a continuity-of-operations mission.

You've registered in SAM, checked all the boxes, and set up your email alerts. Now you're waiting for the perfect opportunity to land in your inbox. Months pass. Maybe you bid on a few things and hear nothing back. Meanwhile, you're watching companies with similar capabilities win contracts you never even knew existed.

You've probably heard that federal contracting is competitive. And in IT services or professional consulting, that's true: dozens of companies fighting over the same contracts, racing to the bottom on price.

But here's what most contractors don't realize: there are entire industries where government agencies struggle to get even a single bid. Not five bidders. Not three. One.

You've built websites for years. You know React, you know UX, you ship projects on time. Somewhere along the way you heard that the federal government needs websites built, and now you're wondering if there's real money there for a small shop like yours.

Here's what nobody tells you: every federal agency has web presence needs. Not just the Department of Defense building classified systems, but the National Park Service updating their visitor portals, the Small Business Administration maintaining their resource pages, and dozens of other agencies that need exactly what you already do. The work exists. The question is whether you're positioned to compete for it.

Every time the Pentagon announces another massive AI contract, I watch contractors scramble in the wrong direction.

Last summer, the Department of Defense awarded contracts to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI. The headlines were everywhere. Contractors saw those numbers and started asking, "How do we get in on that?"

GSA's OASIS+ contract program just got bigger. As of January 12, 2026, all six solicitations are open under continuous enrollment, and five new service domains have been added to the original eight. For professional services contractors, this is the clearest path into long-term federal work.

If you missed the earlier submission windows, the door is open again. And it's staying open.