No Preferential T&C's Mods Allowed for Commercial Item Buys
Client Alert | less than 1 min read | 06.20.11
In Diebold, Inc. (June 2, 2011), GAO sustained a protest when the Comptroller of the Currency had substituted new terms and conditions beneficial to the awardee into a commercial items contract that were not part of the underlying solicitation. While GAO agreed that FAR § 12.302(a) gives an agency discretion to tailor the terms of FAR Clause 52.212-4 to the market practices and conditions for a particular commercial item acquisition, it instructed that all offerors must compete on a common basis against the agency's true needs and so "tailoring" of the terms must occur prior to the submission of final proposals.
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Client Alert | 2 min read | 09.22.25
Department of Education Discontinues Discretionary Grant Funding for Minority-Serving Institutions
The Department of Education (DOE) announced on September 10, 2025, that it will end discretionary funding to several Minority-Serving Institution (MSI) grant programs that, it stated, “discriminate by conferring government benefits exclusively to institutions that meet racial or ethnic quotas.”[1] The agency stated that it would “us[e] its statutory authority to reprogram discretionary funds to programs that do not present such concerns.”[2] This announcement follows a July 2025 decision by the Department of Justice to no longer defend the constitutionality of a provision of the Higher Education Act of 1965 (HEA) that authorizes grant funding to Hispanic-Serving institutions, after determining that such programs “violate the equal-protection component of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.”[3]
Client Alert | 9 min read | 09.22.25
From Deepfakes to Sanctions Violations: The Rise of North Korean Remote IT Worker Schemes
Client Alert | 4 min read | 09.22.25
The Future of Special Contracts in Belgium: a new Book 7 for the Belgian Civil Code
