For two decades, you could go to one website, the FARSite (maintained by Hill Air Force Base), to search for certain clauses, words or phrases wherever they appeared in the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) and the various FAR supplements. Then, at the beginning of last year, a notice appeared on the site that had acquisition officials in government, PTAC counselors, and government contracting personnel at companies up in arms. It said:
Retirement:
The Webmaster, for the last 20 years, for FARSite will be retiring on 03 Jan 2018. He is grateful to have been able to support all the Acquisition Personnel that have utilized FARSite over the years and hopes that the site will continue to be of service in the future.FARSite’s Future:
For now FARSite will continue as you see it. However due to new AF policies, FARSites location will eventually change which inrtoduces unknows that could impact the site in the future. If you have any issues, concerns or opinions as to the sites direction contact USAF SAF/AQC.
By March, it appeared that leadership at Hill AFB had decided that the site was worth saving, with the posting of this announcement:
The FARSite team remains committed to updating the site and providing accurate, current, and complete postings of the FAR and its many supplements. If you have any questions feel free to contact the FARSite Webmaster at Hill.Farsite@us.af.mil.
We would like to thank the previous Webmaster for his decades of outstanding support and dedication to the Air Force.
Now it looks like the plug is finally being pulled on the FARSite for good this fall, with the following notice currently posted on the website:
FARSite.hill.af.mil is being actively transitioned to Acquistion.gov. FARSite will be available in the current location through 30 Sep 2019.
We don’t know exactly what “being actively transitioned” means, but hopefully some of the features that have attracted so many users to the FARSite over the years will be integrated into Acquisition.gov. Currently, only the FAR is hosted at Acquisition.gov (at https://www.acquisition.gov/browse/index/far). You can search the FAR there, but you can’t search any of the FAR supplements, as they aren’t actually hosted on the site. Acquisition only has a page of links to the supplements as posted at each agency’s procurement regulation website. Most, if not all, of those websites do have some search functionality, but there is not one site that you can go to that searches through all of the supplements at once.
I guess we’ll have to wait until this fall and see if the spirit of the FARSite will live on at Acquisition.gov, or if we will sadly mourn its passing and learn to live without it.
There is one other option: You can contact the folks who manage Acquisition.gov and let them know what you want to see happen.