REGULATIONS — Read Me First

This section of the vault is the full text of the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) and the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS), synced nightly from the eCFR.

It’s the rulebook for how the U.S. government buys things. If you’ve ever wondered why a contracting officer says “I can’t do that, FAR 15.306 forbids it,” the answer is in this folder.

Every clause you’ll ever need to cite in a client memo lives here as a real Obsidian note. Type [[DFARS 252.204-7012]] and it resolves. Type ![[DFARS 252.204-7012#^b-2-i|^b-2-i]] and Obsidian transcludes the exact paragraph into your draft.

Start here

These five notes explain the shape of the system before you go digging into clauses.

1. FAR — The Story — What FAR is, why it exists, and how its 53 parts are grouped into 8 subchapters that trace the life of a federal contract from “we need to buy something” to “closeout.”
2. DFARS — The Story — Why defense acquisition has its own 400-page overlay, how DFARS’s part numbers mirror FAR (add 200), and which DFARS provisions drive real client risk (cyber, tech-data rights, FOCI, Buy American/Berry, small business, commercial items).
3. Contract Lifecycle — A crosswalk: at each phase of a procurement (planning, solicitation, award, performance, closeout), here are the FAR/DFARS parts you’ll touch and why.
4. How FAR Is Organized — Numbering primer. Teaches you to read FAR 52.204-21(b)(2)(i) and know exactly what you’re looking at without opening the book.
5. FAR — Index and DFARS — Index — Dataview-powered tables of every clause, filterable by Part and effective date.

Part-by-part explainers

Every FAR Part (1 through 53) has a plain-English explainer in _Explainers/FAR/Part N.md. Open one to learn what that Part actually does before you start reading the literal regulatory text.

DFARS parts that materially add to their FAR parallel have explainers in _Explainers/DFARS/Part 2NN.md. (Most DFARS parts are minor procedural variants on their FAR counterpart; only the substantive ones are explained here — see DFARS — The Story for which ones matter.)

By topic

Every clause is tagged (cyber, cui, cmmc, ip-rights, tech-data, small-business, foci, buy-american, supply-chain, sca-dba, protests, terminations, export-control, cost-accounting, commercial-items, etc.). The _meta/By Tag/ folder has one Dataview index per tag — open _meta/By Tag/cyber.md for every cyber clause across FAR and DFARS, regardless of which Part it lives in.

Conventions in this vault

• Filenames match the citation you’d type. FAR 52.204-21.md, DFARS 252.204-7012.md. Typing [[52.204-21]] also resolves (alias).
• Every paragraph that has a lettering in the source XML has an Obsidian block ID. So ![[DFARS 252.204-7012#^b-2-i|^b-2-i]] transcludes just the (b)(2)(i) sub-paragraph into a memo. Use these to quote regulatory text at paragraph granularity instead of dumping whole clauses.
• The verbatim regulatory text is NEVER paraphrased. If you need plain-English, use the explainer notes in _Explainers/. The clause notes themselves are legally citable copies of the eCFR source.
• Amendment history is preserved by vault git. When a clause changes on eCFR, the next far-sync sync run commits a diff. Run far-sync blame "FAR 52.204-21" from the command line to see the full amendment trail for one clause.

What’s NOT in here yet

Things the sync explicitly doesn’t cover in v1:

• PGI (DFARS Procedures, Guidance, and Information — the non-binding how-to companion to DFARS)
• Agency supplements beyond DoD — AFFARS (Air Force), AFARS (Army), NMCARS (Navy/Marine Corps), SOFARS (SOCOM), NFS (NASA), HHSAR, GSAR, DEAR, DOSAR, etc.
• Class deviations (agency-specific suspensions of a FAR/DFARS rule for a bounded period)
• Federal Register FAC watcher (the daily/weekly amendment notifications; we pull amendments on sync but don’t pre-announce pending ones)

All of those can be added later by extending far-sync. For now: FAR + DFARS is the core rulebook, and that’s what’s here.

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Synced by far-sync at far-sync. Source: eCFR. Last full sync listed in CHANGELOG.