Briefing
The FAR Rewrite and Your Technical Data
What Is Happening
A Rewrite Delivered in Installments
Executive Order 14275, signed in April 2025, directed a rewrite of the Federal Acquisition Regulation and its supplements. It is the first full-scale rewrite since the FAR came into being in 1984, and it is being delivered in two phases: interim class deviations that take effect immediately, then formal rulemaking to make the changes permanent. For anyone working defense programs the date that mattered was 1 February 2026, when the first thirty-one DFARS class deviations took effect, with further deviations released on a rolling basis since.
The rolling delivery is the part worth internalizing, because it changes the nature of the question. A stable regulation lets a program learn its obligations once. A regulation arriving in installments means the rules that apply are the rules as they stood on the date of your solicitation, and two bids six months apart may genuinely differ. Most coverage of this is written for contracts and compliance teams, which is correct and leaves the publications side unaddressed, so that is what the rest of this covers.
The Structure That Holds
Four Categories, Unchanged
Start with what is not moving, because it is the thing everything else hangs from. Technical data and software rights still split into four categories, and which one attaches to a given deliverable still decides what the government may do with it:
Unlimited rights
The government may use, disclose, and reproduce the data without restriction, including giving it to your competitors.
Government purpose rights
Government use is unrestricted, but commercial use by others is not. Historically converts to unlimited rights after five years unless negotiated.
Limited rights
Applies to technical data developed exclusively at private expense. Narrow permitted uses, and the marking is what preserves them.
Restricted rights
The software counterpart to limited rights, with its own narrower permissions.
Two timing traps sit inside that structure and neither is new, which is precisely why they keep catching people. Markings are a pre-award discipline. A contractor who misses the window to assert and mark proprietary data can lose the protection entirely, and no amount of careful delivery afterwards recovers it. And government purpose rights run on a clock, historically five years, after which they convert to unlimited unless something was negotiated. Both of those are decisions made by people who will never open the resulting manual, and both determine what the manual is worth.
This is the same territory as the NDAA technical data inventory and the steady movement toward government-owned repositories. The direction has been consistent for years: the department wants more rights, earlier, in forms it can actually use. The FAR rewrite does not reverse that. It renumbers the road.
The Practical Bit
Your Templates Are Quietly Wrong
Here is the concrete consequence for anyone who produces technical data deliverables, and it is unglamorous enough that almost nobody has actioned it. Clauses are being renumbered. The widely cited example is the basic safeguarding requirement that lived at FAR 52.204-21 and now appears at FAR 52.240-93. The obligation did not change. The address did.
Technical data requirements are cited by number in exactly the documents that get copied forward without being re-read: CDRLs, statements of work, data item descriptions, and the tailoring blocks inside a TMCR. A proposal template written in 2023 and reused since is now citing addresses that may not resolve. It will not fail loudly. It will produce a compliance matrix that points at the wrong paragraph, and that gets discovered by an evaluator rather than by you.
The fix is an afternoon of work that nobody has scheduled. Inventory every place your proposal and delivery templates name a FAR or DFARS clause number. The list is almost always shorter than people fear, because the same boilerplate is reused across a whole organization, which is also why fixing it once fixes it everywhere. Then treat the citation chain in each new solicitation as something to verify rather than recognize, which is the same discipline our contract review checklist has always argued for, now with a better reason than usual.
What Survives the Next Version
Build the Habit, Not the Answer
A closing caution, aimed at this article as much as anything else. Phase one deviations are in force and still accumulating, phase two rulemaking will move details again, and any summary of the current state has a short shelf life. Memorizing this month's answer is a poor investment.
What holds across every version is a small set of practices: know where your citations live so you can check them quickly, mark data before award rather than after, and keep a current picture of what you actually owe and hold so that a regulatory change becomes a lookup instead of an investigation. Programs that can answer “which clauses do we cite, and where” in an afternoon will absorb this rewrite without drama. Programs that cannot will absorb it during a proposal, which is the expensive way to learn the same thing.
FAQ
Questions We Hear
What is the FAR overhaul?
A rewrite of the Federal Acquisition Regulation, directed by Executive Order 14275 in April 2025, and the first full-scale rewrite since the FAR was created in 1984. It is being delivered in two phases: interim class deviations that take effect immediately, followed by formal rulemaking to make the changes permanent. For defense contractors the practical milestone was 1 February 2026, when the first thirty-one DFARS class deviations took effect, with more released on a rolling basis since.
Does it change technical data rights?
The four categories that decide what the government may do with your data, unlimited, government purpose, limited, and restricted, remain the structure everything hangs on. What is moving is the surrounding machinery: clause numbering, thresholds, and the supporting rules including a revised CUI rule. Because the deviations are rolling rather than issued at once, the honest answer to 'what applies to us' is that it depends on the date of your solicitation, which is a genuinely new kind of homework for programs used to a stable regulation.
Why does clause renumbering matter for technical publications?
Because technical data requirements are cited by clause number in places that are copied forward for years: CDRLs, statements of work, data item descriptions, and the tailoring blocks inside a TMCR. When numbers move, every template that references them is quietly wrong. A widely cited example is the basic safeguarding requirement that used to sit at FAR 52.204-21 and now appears at FAR 52.240-93. Nothing about the obligation changed. Everything about finding it did.
What should a publications team do about it?
Three things, none of which require a lawyer to start. Inventory where your proposal and delivery templates cite FAR or DFARS clause numbers, because that list is shorter than people expect and nobody has ever written it down. Check that your data markings are being applied before award rather than after, since the pre-award window is where limited rights are preserved or lost. And treat the citation chain in any new solicitation as something to verify rather than recognize, because the number you remember may now point somewhere else.
Is this settled enough to act on?
It is settled enough to prepare and not settled enough to memorize. Phase one deviations are in force now and are being added to on a rolling basis, and phase two rulemaking will change details again. That argues for building the habit rather than the answer: know where your citations live, verify them per solicitation, and keep your markings disciplined. Those three practices survive every version of the regulation, which is more than can be said for any summary written this month, including this one.
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Citing Clauses You Have Not Re-read?
We review technical data requirements against what a solicitation actually cites, before pricing locks. Send us the TMCR and the CDRLs and we will extract the chain.