Guidance on Whether to Replace or Retain a Federal Specification

    It is the policy of the federal government and the Department of Defense (DoD) to use non-government standards or commercial item descriptions in preference to developing or maintaining federal specifications. All three types of documents may be used when describing the requirements of a commercially available product. The following criteria will help you in making the correct selection.

1. You should consider replacing the federal specification with a non-government standard if:

a. A suitable non-government standard exists. In this case, the federal specification should be canceled and replaced with the non-government standard after first coordinating the proposed cancellation notice with government users and affected industry, and taking any objections under consideration.

b. A non-government standard exists, but would have to be revised to be a suitable replacement. If you believe the cognizant non-government standards committee would be willing to undertake the effort, then this approach should be used. If you know that the non-government standards committee would not be willing to change the document or it would require an exceedingly long period of time, then consider developing a commercial item description.

c. If a non-government standard does not exist, you should consider two possible alternatives: (1) If there is a non-government standards committee, which has an interest and could develop a non-government standard replacement document in a reasonable amount of time, then pursue this path. You should inform government and industry users of the effort in case they wish to participate on the committee. (2) If there is not a non-government standards committee or if the committee has no interest or is going to take an exceedingly long time, consider developing a commercial item description.

2. You should consider replacing the federal specification with a commercial item description if the non-government standard option is not a viable approach (see discussion above). Most federal specifications can and should be replaced with either non-government standards or commercial item descriptions.

3. A federal specification should only be retained if:

• it is still needed for government procurement and it cannot reasonably be converted to a CID;
• if extensive government-unique (but not military unique) requirements are necessary; or
• if extensive testing is necessary, which must be described in the document rather than by reference to a non-government standard.