The Pentagon’s process to protest contract awards could be revised to include extra costs during next week’s all-night debate on the defense policy bill, according to Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas.
Protests of contract awards have become the norm, especially in major contracts in which a lot of money is at stake. In addition to costing the government money to evaluate these protests, they also slow down the start of a new program.
Thornberry, who chairs the House Armed Services Committee, said members have raised the issue with him enough times that he expects it to be brought up at next week’s markup, where lawmakers will have the opportunity to offer amendments to Thornberry’s version of the fiscal 2017 National Defense Authorization Act.
Specifically, he said some members have talked to him about making companies pay a fine if they initiate a protest and then lose.
“It’s an area of concern that I think we’ll debate,” Thornberry told reporters Thursday at a breakfast hosted by the Defense Writers Group.
The House Armed Services Committee will meet at 10 a.m. on Wednesday to begin its markup, which is expected to go into the early hours of Thursday morning.
Thornberry said the committee will mark to the budget top line in the president’s budget request, but will do so with money in different accounts. President Obama asked Congress to authorize $610 billion for defense in fiscal 2017, with $556 billion in the base budget and the rest in a war chest to fund overseas operations.
The committee will mark to the $610 billion top line, but will put $574 billion in the base budget, Thornberry said, which is $18 billion higher than the base budget request. That will leave only enough war funds to pay for operations through April of next year, which will give the next president a chance to revise his or her strategy overseas and ask Congress for the money to execute it, he said.
While this is not ideal, Thornberry said it gives Congress the best chance to pass an appropriations bill that avoids another continuing resolution.
The chairman’s mark also includes many of the acquisition reforms Thornberry introduced as standalone legislation this year, with some tweaks. For example, the bill he introduced required the Pentagon to use an open architecture for every program to allow new technology to easily and inexpensively be swapped into existing systems.
But the Pentagon and the defense industry pushed back against that requirement, saying that things like satellites that would never need to be updated didn’t need an open architecture.
Thornberry said his markup of the NDAA, set to be released next week, wrote in more flexibility that allows the department to judge the best system for each specific instance, but still encourages the use of as much open architecture as possible.
