General Services Administration Issues Class-Wide Waiver of Trade Agreements Act and Buy American Act for All GSA Contracts and Schedules for Supplies to Combat the COVID-19 Virus
McCarter & English – In a Class Determination and Findings (CD&F) published on April 3, 2020, the GSA’s Senior Procurement Executive directed that certain limited supplies to combat the COVID-19 virus identified in the CD&F may be acquired without regard to the domestic preference restrictions imposed by the Trade Agreements Act (TAA) and the Buy American Act (BAA) clauses included in the GSA Schedule and GSA individual procurements. The Senior Procurement Executive concluded that waivers of the domestic preference restrictions were warranted based on scarcity in that the supplies were deemed “temporarily unavailable in sufficient quantity or satisfactory quality” or not “mined, produced, or manufactured in the United States in sufficient and reasonably commercial quantities of a satisfactory quality.”
