The Federal Acquisition Regulations, usually referred to as the FAR (or sometimes F.A.R.), are a series of regulations issued by the U.S. Federal government that concern the requirements of contractors for selling to the government, the terms under which the government obtains ownership, title and control of the goods or services purchased, and rules on specifications, payments and conduct and actions regarding solicitation of bids and payment of invoices. The U.S. Constitution, adopted in 1789 by a constitutional convention, sets down the basic framework of American government in its seven articles. ... A contractor is in a legal sense one who enters into a binding agreement to perform a certain service or provide a certain product in exchange for valuable consideration, monetary, goods,services, even barter arrangements. ... Bid (Medical) (a medical abbreviation commonly seen on prescriptions) Bid price (a financial term) Efforts to get any thing or to get the right to celebrate an event. ...

The FAR consists of tens of thousands of pages as published in the Federal Register and consist of two parts: the general acquisition regulations that govern all transactions with the government in general, and the specific regulations issued by a specific federal agency that govern transactions with that agency. One of the best-known examples of the latter is the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS) which is used by the Department of Defense. The Federal Register contains most routine publications and public notices of United States government agencies. ... The United States Department of Defense, abbreviated DoD or DOD and sometimes called the Defense Department, is a civilian Cabinet organization of the United States government. ...

The purpose of the FAR is to specify exactly how the government is to acquire a particular product or service, how it is to be judged in terms of quality and price, and to ensure the government does not pay for certain prohibited practices such as cost of lobbying, cost of financing (the government is presumed to pay its bills and thus the supplier should not have to include loss reserves), and to prevent kickbacks, undue influence, corruption and other misconduct. It may also include requirements for purchases to be made in the United States, for large organizations to use smaller ones (including women- and minority-owned and disadvantaged business enterprises) as subcontractors, to not discriminate against certain classes of people, to engage in certain practices such as minority hiring and affirmative action, and other requirements depending on the type of contract and its dollar value. This article is about political corruption. ... A misconduct is a legal term meaning a wrongful, improper, or unlawful conduct motivated by premeditated or intentional purpose or by obstinate indifference to the consequences of ones acts. ... Affirmative action (U.S. English), or positive discrimination (British English), is a policy or a program promoting the representation in various systems of people of a group who have traditionally been discriminated against, with the aim of creating a more egalitarian society. ...

For example, when the U.S. Government purchases a computer program, it obtains complete ownership of that program unless the program is supplied pursuant to the commercial computer software provisions of the FAR, in which case it receives only restricted rights, similar to that of an ordinary purchaser of software at retail. A computer program or software program (usually abbreviated to a program) is a step-by-step list of instructions written for a particular computer architecture in a particular computer programming language. ...

When a government agency issues a contract or a proposal it will generally specify a long list of FAR provisions that apply to that contract. The FAR provisions will typically cover a hundred pages or more, and specify certain conditions which the bidder must either comply with or be able to comply with in order to be awarded the contract, unless the bidder is in some manner exempt from them for various reasons (such as being below a certain size in terms of either net income or number of employees, for example).

In many cases, contract awards can be challenged and set aside if a challenger can prove the FARs have not been complied with; in some cases the challenger will do this in an attempt to disqualify a particular bidder, usually so that the challenger can be awarded the contract in lieu of the original bidder's award of the contract.