Clauses · FAR · Banned sources and products · provision
FAR 52.204-26 Covered Telecommunications Equipment or Services-Representation
Does the regulation require it to flow down?
No
The representation itself has no flow-down mandate — 4.2105(c) addresses a Government solicitation. The mandate lives in its clause twin: 52.204-25(d) requires the prohibition clause to be inserted in all subcontracts, including subcontracts for commercial products, commercial services and COTS. Primes flow the representation down anyway because it is the evidence behind their own 52.204-24/-26 answers to the Government: they cannot honestly represent about their supply chain without asking you. l3harris-lgl-50-f1 and -f2 (Feb 2026) both tag it "(applies to solicitations)", which is correct phase discipline and worth copying; bae-usgova (Mar 2025) lists it flat with no such note
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 Oct 2020 · base v0.9.3 Read the text ↗
What it makes you produce
One item for your checklist.
Something you fill in and send back
Hours, once you know which one is missing.
Two answers: whether you provide covered telecommunications equipment or services as part of what you sell, and whether, after a reasonable inquiry, you use them anywhere in your business, on any contract or none
FAR 52.204-26(c)
When it is used
Prescribed at FAR 4.2105(c): "The contracting officer shall insert the provision at 52.204-26, Covered Telecommunications Equipment or Services-Representation, in all solicitations." No dollar threshold, no commercial carve-out, no COTS carve-out, no exceptions of any kind in 4.2105 — Section 889 was written to reach commercial and COTS acquisitions. The provision is the representation half of a three-piece set: 52.204-24 is the offer-stage representation for a specific procurement (4.2105(a)), 52.204-25 is the CLAUSE carrying the actual prohibition and the flow-down mandate (4.2105(b), all solicitations and contracts), and 52.204-26 is the general-status representation. Definitions of "covered telecommunications equipment or services" and "reasonable inquiry" are borrowed from 52.204-25, which is already in this base.
Read closely
Reasonable inquiry is an internal review of your own operations — the phone system, the cameras in the shop, the routers, the video-conference kit and any managed service running on them — and it does not extend to auditing suppliers or hiring an investigator. The provision does not say what record to keep, and a dated list of makes and models is what the answer stands on if it is ever contested. Paragraph (b) also points at the excluded parties list in SAM. The prohibition and the flow-down mandate live in the clause twin, FAR 52.204-25.
The 3 templates that name it, with the line
Source: acquisition.gov, FAR 52.204-26 and FAR 4.2105(c) (verified 2026-08-05); RFO consolidation proposal read at govinfo, FR 2026-12559, published 2026-06-23
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.