Clauses · DFARS · Supply chain and sourcing
DFARS 252.225-7030 Restriction on Acquisition of Carbon, Alloy, and Armor Steel Plate
Does the regulation require it to flow down?
No
There is no subcontract paragraph anywhere in 252.225-7030 — the clause runs (a), (b), (End of clause) and never mentions subcontracts. Primes flow it down because the obligation is a material-origin fact they cannot verify from their own shop floor: the melt-and-roll origin is fixed at the mill, several tiers below, so the only way a prime can stand behind the restriction is to push it, verbatim, onto whoever actually buys the plate. Five of the six corpus documents carrying it are pure flow-down matrices (AAR, BAE, three Northrop CTM-P-ST templates, RTX) that impose it on 'All Orders' with no destination test at all — broader than 225.7011-3 prescribes.
A clause can reach your subcontract without a mandate. Once it is in your document, it is a contract term all the same. The missing mandate is a fact about the regulation. It is not a ruling on your order.
Checked against acquisition.gov on 2026-08-05 · edition DEC 2006 · base v0.9.3 Read the text ↗
What it makes you produce
One item for your checklist.
Something somebody else has to issue you
The same day if the issuer is one of your own suppliers, months if it is an assessor or an underwriter.
A mill test report or certificate of conformance naming the melting mill and the rolling mill by country, from the mill or the service center — evidence the prime weighs, not paper the clause names
DFARS 252.225-7030
When it is used
DFARS 225.7011-3 prescribes it, absent a waiver, in solicitations and contracts that (a) require delivery to the Government of carbon, alloy, or armor steel plate for use in a Government-owned facility or a facility under DoD control, or (b) require contractors operating in such a facility to purchase that plate. Statutory base is section 8111 of the FY 1992 DoD Appropriations Act (Pub. L. 102-172) and successor appropriations acts (225.7011-1). There is no dollar threshold anywhere in 225.7011, and no commercial or COTS carve-out is written into the prescription — but the clause is absent from DFARS 212.301, so DoD does not prescribe it for FAR part 12 acquisitions. The restriction reaches the plate only as a finished steel mill product used 'as is' or as intermediate material; it does not reach an end product (the clause's own example is a machine tool) that merely contains steel plate as a component.
Read closely
(a) is the restriction and it has two halves — melted AND rolled in the United States or Canada — so a distributor's statement that the plate is US sourced leaves the melt half open. (b) confines it to plate supplied as a finished mill product, used as it is or cut and fabricated, and not to a finished machine that happens to contain a plate, so the line items decide whether the restriction reaches what you deliver at all.
The 6 templates that name it, with the line
Source: acquisition.gov, DFARS 252.225-7030, DFARS 225.7011-1, 225.7011-2 and 225.7011-3, and DFARS 212.301 (verified 2026-08-05)
This is research, not legal advice. It states what the regulation says about this clause and cites the paragraph behind it. It does not rule on your order, and it does not rule on whether a prime's markings are correct.