Where Are We Going with Section 889 Part B?
Part B of Section 889 of the fiscal year 2019 National Defense Authorization Act broadly prohibits the federal government from contracting with entities that use certain Chinese telecommunications equipment and services. The authors of this article explain how the government’s piecemeal and inconsistent implementation of the rule has placed government contractors in an untenable position and what they should do now.
Months have passed since the August 13, 2020 effective date of Part B of Section 889 of the fiscal year 2019 National Defense Authorization Act. Part B, sometimes referred to as the Chinese telecommunications equipment ban, broadly prohibits the federal government from contracting with entities that use certain Chinese telecommunications (including video surveillance) equipment and services.
BACKGROUND
After the FAR Council published its July 10, 2020 Interim Rule, contractors, large and small, spent countless hours working to be able to certify compliance by August 13. This deadline was critical because the Interim Rule said that absent such a certification, a contractor was ineligible for future contract awards. That is, government agencies were prohibited from renewing or extending existing contracts with contractors unable to certify Part B compliance. Indeed, agencies were prohibited from issuing an order under an existing contract to a contractor that failed to certify compliance.
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“Where Are We Going with Section 889 Part B?” by Justin A. Chiarodo, Merle M. DeLancey, Jr., and Robyn N. Burrows was published in the January 2021 edition of Pratt’s Government Contracting Law Report (Vol. 7, No. 1), an A.S. Pratt Publication, LexisNexis. Reprinted with permission.
This article was first published in Blank Rome's Government Contracts Navigator blog on October 26, 2020.