OMB Receives Anti-Kaspersky FAR Rule for Review

Yesterday the OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) announced that it had received for review an interim final rule for a Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) for the use of products or services from the Kaspersky Labs. This rulemaking was not included in the Fall 2017 Unified Agenda.

This is probably a rule implementing the requirements of §1634 of HR 2810, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2018. That bill was signed into law on December 12^th, 2017 (PL 115-91, not yet printed); which would explain why this rule did not make the last Unified Agenda.

That section would prohibit any “department, agency, organization, or other element of the Federal Government” from using “any hardware, software, or services developed or provided, in whole or in part, by” {§1634(a)} Kaspersky Labs. The effective date of that prohibition is October 1^st, 2018 which is undoubtedly the reason for going the ‘interim final rule’ route.