{"id":9777,"date":"2026-02-04T15:29:48","date_gmt":"2026-02-04T15:29:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/federal-government-drops-consideration-of-dei-policies-in-federal-contract-awards\/"},"modified":"2026-02-04T15:29:48","modified_gmt":"2026-02-04T15:29:48","slug":"federal-government-drops-consideration-of-dei-policies-in-federal-contract-awards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/federal-government-drops-consideration-of-dei-policies-in-federal-contract-awards\/","title":{"rendered":"Federal Government Drops Consideration of DEI Policies in Federal Contract Awards"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div id=\"contentSummaryCollapse\" style=\"--intro-p-height: 10.3125rem;\">\n<div class=\"inner-collapse\">\n<p>On February 18, 2025, the U.S. General Services Administration (\u201cGSA\u201d) <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gsa.gov\/about-us\/newsroom\/news-releases\/gsa-announces-far-class-deviations-guidance-for-contracting-officers-02182025\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">announced<\/a> that it had issued two deviations to the Federal Acquisition Regulations (\u201cFAR\u201d) and procurement practices. With these deviations, federal agencies will no longer consider companies\u2019 diversity, equity and inclusion (\u201cDEI\u201d) practices when awarding federal contracts for goods and services, reversing a Biden administration policy, and federal contracting officers are allowed to amend or modify current solicitations and contracts without penalty. The GSA stated that these actions were necessary to implement certain Executive Orders issued by President Trump, including the \u201cEnding Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity\u201d Executive Order. As we previously discussed, shortly after his inauguration, President Trump signed an Executive Order requiring federal contracts to include terms (i)\u00a0\u201crequiring the contractual counterparty or grant recipient to agree that its compliance in all respects with all applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws is material to the government\u2019s payment decisions\u201d; and (ii)\u00a0\u201crequiring such counterparty or recipient to certify that it does not operate any programs promoting DEI that violate any applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The GSA stated that these actions were the \u201cfirst steps in transforming\u201d the more than 2,000-page FAR into a \u201csensible, common sense guideline\u201d that is \u201cbetter align[ed] with commercial practices.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"ql-align-center\" style=\"text-align: center;\">*\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0*\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0*<\/p>\n<p>Find more Blog posts about litigation and regulatory developments that affect the workplace\u00a0here.<\/p>\n<p>View other S&amp;C insights relating to\u00a0President Trump\u2019s recent executive orders.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On February 18, 2025, the U.S. General Services Administration (\u201cGSA\u201d) announced that it had issued two deviations to the Federal Acquisition Regulations (\u201cFAR\u201d) and procurement practices. With these [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9778,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[2052,7425,1462,134,1108,554,958,4612],"class_list":["post-9777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-awards","tag-consideration","tag-contract","tag-dei","tag-drops","tag-federal","tag-government","tag-policies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9777"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9777\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9778"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}