Rep. Mac Thornberry said Tuesday that some changes in his annual acquisition reform package are designed to keep businesses from abandoning the Defense Department over clunky processes and intellectual property practices that industry sees as unfair.
“I have become very concerned that many companies are looking, because they’ve told me, at walking away from doing business with the Department of Defense,” the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee said at a Brookings Institution event. “We can’t afford that. So I tried to just take a common sense approach to the intellectual property issue when it comes to who paid for it and then who has the data rights to it.”
Thornberry’s acquisition reform plan for fiscal 2017, which he introduced Tuesday, would allow the government to negotiate over who owns which pieces of the intellectual property on projects jointly funded by government and private funds. Under the current system, all intellectual property rights automatically go to the government in joint funded programs.
Interfaces will still remain open source to allow components designed by different companies to plug into existing platforms, something Thornberry said he hopes will increase competition and encourage more small businesses to compete for contracts.
“I do worry about the narrowing of the industrial base. I worry even more about the alienation of these tremendously innovative companies … from doing defense work,” Thornberry said.
Asked what incentive the Pentagon will have to meet companies in the middle, Thornberry said they won’t have a choice because companies will walk away from the table if the Defense Department isn’t willing to meet them halfway.
“If DoD says ‘whatever you got, I own,’ then they’re walking. They’re not going to do business with the Department of Defense,” he said. “So DoD is going to have to sit down with component maker A and say ‘OK, you put this much money into it, we put this much money in’ … and negotiate that out. Otherwise, they’re not going to have these companies to do business with.”
