The House and Senate will likely put forward the defense authorization bill conference report by the end of the week, allowing both chambers to take up the legislation before going on recess in August, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) said today.
Still on the table are the acquisition reform portions of the bill, he said during a speech at the Heritage Foundation. Both McCain and his counterpart on the House Armed Services Committee, Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), are first-time defense committee chairmen and have made improving the weapons-buying process a key focus.
But McCain has yet to persuade Thornberry to adopt language in SASC’s bill that would move acquisition authority from the Office of Secretary of Defense to the service chiefs.
“I have a very strong and good relationship with Chairman Thornberry. We are in the midst of those discussions now,” he said. “I hope to convince him. We have not resolved that.”
The Defense Department official that would likely be most affected by SASC’s reforms—Pentagon acquisition chief Frank Kendall—has raised alarms about giving the service chiefs more power (Defense Daily, May 19). The service chiefs tend to be overly optimistic about programs, which in turn leads to greater risk, he has argued.
McCain said he would continue to work with Kendall, but he hasn’t seen enough progress since Kendall became the undersecretary of acquisition, technology and logistics (AT&L).
“We’re making [the service chiefs] responsible for many of these programs that have gone amok, including over the five years of Mr. Kendall’s time as AT&L,” he said. “The facts are that the cost of our weapons systems has continued out of control, and to say the status quo is satisfactory is an insult to anyone’s intelligence.”
Since the reconciliation process started earlier this month, details on the conference bill have been scarce.
Last week, HASC’s top Democrat, Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), said that he was not convinced that McCain’s plan of giving greater power to the service chiefs would lead to greater accountability, likening it to “rearrang[ing] the deck chairs.”
“I’d have to talk to Sen. McCain about his proposal,” he said July 9 in a roundtable with reporters.
Smith said he wants the compromise bill to contain greater authority for the department to quickly buy commercial, off-the-shelf items and a streamlining of responsibility, so that there are “fewer chefs in the kitchen” adding requirements that increase a program’s cost and complexity.
He pointed to the Marine Corps’ failed Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle as an example of out-of-control requirements, likening it to a character from the Austin Powers films demanding sharks with head-mounted lasers.
The Marine Corps canceled that program and has since begun a new effort, the Amphibious Combat Vehicle (ACV) program, which is limited to non-developmental, off the shelf transporters. However, Smith believes even the ACV program is bogged down with bureaucracy, as the Pentagon couldn’t simply look at existing vehicles and make a decision, it had to start a new competitive process. That increases the danger of new requirements being added along the way, he said.
Ultimately, both McCain and Smith indicated President Barack Obama will veto the authorization bill to pressure Congress to begin negotiations to lift budget caps on both defense and non-defense discretionary spending.
This morning, McCain talked with Defense Secretary Ash Carter, who said he would recommend a veto. “I am very disappointed that he would do that,” the SASC chairman said.
That veto should be saved for an appropriations bill that spends money instead of the National Defense Authorization Act, which recommends it, McCain said, but he agreed that sequestration must be repealed—at least for defense spending.
“If you … [tell] any company or corporation or small or large business in America that you can only budget for one year at a time and you don’t know what the budget for the next year is, they’ll tell you that it’s impossible. That’s what we’re doing now, and it has to be fixed,” he said. “I’ll put the blame on the Republicans. I’ll put it on Democrats.”
In a panel following McCain’ speech, experts said it was unlikely that Congress would reach a budget agreement before the fiscal year starts on Oct 1.
More probable is that lawmakers will push off finding a solution until December—the “crisis time” when issues such as the debt ceiling will likely come to a head, said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, and John Bonsell, SAIC’s [SAIC] vice president for government affairs and a former SASC minority staff director.