As lawmakers gear up for the next round of changes to how the Defense Department buys weapons, some experts are saying Congress should go easy on a short-staffed Pentagon.
In recent years, Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, has released a standalone acquisition reform bill that ends up getting folded into the National Defense Authorization Act when it is introduced later in the year. Past years have seen some radical changes, including the separation of the Pentagon’s top acquisition, technology and logistics role into two jobs that focus on business and innovation in the fiscal 2017 bill.
The acquisition bill from Thornberry is expected in April and will focus on “defense contracting, data transparency and contract auditing reform,” according to a letter Thornberry sent to Rep. Diane Black, the chairman of the Budget Committee, this month.
But Tom Spoehr, an analyst with the Heritage Foundation, said he’s hoping the fiscal 2018 bill makes fewer changes than in past years because many Pentagon positions are not yet filled in Trump’s administration and to give the department some time to see how past reforms are working before Congress makes more.
“It’s like trying to diagnose a sick patient. You try one drug, and before it takes effect, shoot them with another drug,” Spoehr said. “You don’t know whether that one drug worked or whether it’s the new drug.”
Because of the late passage of the fiscal 2017 defense authorization bill and the turnover that comes with a new administration, Spoehr said the reforms passed in last year’s bill “have barely even been started.
“It’s fair to say that I think they should take a little bit of a break on acquisition reform and let the system digest all these big things,” he said.
But Andrew Hunter, an expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that, while allowing the Pentagon to catch its breath could be a good thing, it’s something that’s been discussed before but rarely actually happens.
“Every year that I have been involved in acquisition reform for last 20 years, someone has said we really ought to take a time out, the system needs time to recover,” Hunter said. “There’s a fair amount of truth in that, but it never happens. Thornberry is going to introduce a bill, and it’s going to have a bunch of stuff in it.”
A spokesman for Thornberry declined to get into details of what might be in the acquisition proposal, but the congressman told reporters this month that he has previously struggled to find partners to work on reforms in President Barack Obama’s Pentagon.
“Reform can be most successful when we do it in partnership, and I am anxious to have a willing partner to work with on all these reform ideas,” he said.
The letter from Thornberry said one area of focus will be reforms to the contract auditing process at the Pentagon. While Pentagon contracts were previously all audited by the Defense Contract Audit Agency, a section of the fiscal 2017 National Defense Authorization Act allowed the agency to accept commercial audits if certain conditions are met.
Scott Amey, general counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, said he worried that opening the audit process to more privatization could ultimately “allow contractors to get away with a lot more” and harm the taxpayer.
Hunter also said that Thornberry could try to tackle reforms to give the military more flexibility to move money between research and development and procurement accounts, as well as to let the burdensome, bureaucratic acquisition process move quicker in areas where technology is evolving more quickly. Thornberry could also work to reform how the Pentagon buys services, which make up a large portion of the department’s budget, Hunter said.
