On 15 January 2026, the Bundestag passed the draft bill for a law on accelerated planning and procurement for the German Armed Forces (BwPBBG). Compared to the earlier draft bill (on which we reported), there have been a few adjustments during the legislative process.
A selection of the key new changes in public procurement law
- The proposed “exemplary rules” for the exemption of national contracts and direct awards under Article 346 TFEU have been expanded to include a further exemplary rule. Under this, the essential security interests of the Federal Republic of Germany may be impacted if key defence industry technologies (as defined in the National Security and Defence Industry Strategy) are affected on federal territory or if the public contract contributes to strengthening technological sovereignty in the security and defence industry on federal territory (Section 2 (1) No. 4 BwPBBG). The draft law does not provide a definition of what is covered by “technological sovereignty” An indication, albeit for cloud infrastructures, is provided by the EU Commission’s Cloud Sovereignty Framework of October 2025. According to this, sovereignty aspects can be strategic (owner stability, influence of corporate management), operational (business continuity independent of foreign countries, availability of skilled workers), technical (openness, transparency and independence of the underlying technology platform) or related to the supply chain (geographical origin, transparency and resilience of the supply chain). The issue of technological sovereignty is currently coming to the fore in the procurement sector, even beyond procurement for the German Armed Forces: in addition to the European Cloud Sovereignty Framework mentioned above, German Chancellor Merz and French President Macron spoke out in favour of strengthening European independence in the digital sphere at the Franco-German summit on European digital sovereignty on 18 November. Both German and European providers, as well as the so-called US hyperscalers, have recently entered the market with new cloud offerings that address the issue of sovereignty in various ways.
- In future, contracts that include IT services are to be designed in such a way that they cover appropriate updates and upgrades for the IT services (Section 14 (5) BwPBBG). In this context, the legislator explicitly refers to the Supplementary Contractual Conditions for the Procurement of IT Services (EVB-IT), which can be used as standard agreements.
- When submitting applications to participate or tenders, contracting authorities should be able to require bidders to show they meet requirements specified by the contracting authority regarding the adequate supply of key resources (raw materials for which there are dependencies on autocratic third countries).
- The possibility for the public contracting authority to grant advance payments to the contractor (Section 56 BHO) is being expanded and will in future be permissible to ensure higher quality of performance or accelerated expansion of defence industry capacities (Section 5 No. 2, 3 BwPBBG). Public contracting authorities are also required to examine whether performance-based contracts can be awarded, particularly in the case of complex projects (Section 9 (7) BwPBBG). This is intended to accelerate or reduce delays.
- Market surveys, which must be conducted, must also take civilian markets into account to determine the possibilities for adapting and using commercially available civilian products, processes and technologies for military purposes (cf. Section 7 (1) sentence 2 BwPBBG).
- When purchasing armaments from third countries, the contracting authority must verify that European technological sovereignty or production capacities in Germany or the European Union are not jeopardised (Section 11 (6) BwPBBG).
- To identify innovative service concepts, the contracting authority should in future be able to hold pre-commercial competitions (Section 14 (4) BwPBBG). This must be followed by a procurement procedure for the award of the contract, e.g. in the form of an innovation partnership, a negotiated procedure with a functional description of services or a competitive dialogue.
Outlook for further simplification options
The Federal Government is also examining further simplification options: By 31 December 2026, it will be examined whether further exemptions can be included in laws and regulations to meet the procurement needs of the Bundeswehr. A Bundeswehr Infrastructure Acceleration Act with exemptions in construction and environmental law is planned to accelerate the Bundeswehr’s construction projects. By 30 September 2026, the Federal Government intends to develop guidelines for the promotion of compensation transactions (so-called offsets).
Timetable
The Act will enter into force on the day after its promulgation and will remain in force until 31 December 2035. If the Bundesrat does not call on the Mediation Committee, promulgation can be expected soon. The shorter time limit for the suspension of the lot allocation principle has been deleted, so that the general term of the BwPBBG also applies to the suspension of the lot allocation principle.
