By Emelie Rutherford
House Armed Services Committee (HASC) leaders unveiled yesterday a new acquisition-reform bill intended to control spending on major weapon systems by increasing input into and alternatives for their development.
“This piece of legislation could well be, at the end of the day, as important to military and defense of our country as the Goldwater-Nichols bill was in 1986,” HASC Chairman Ike Skelton (D-Mo.) told reporters yesterday.
The new Weapons Acquisition System Reform Through Enhancing Technical Knowledge and Oversight (WASTE TKO) Act is distinct from the Weapon Systems Acquisition Reform Act of 2009, which was filed February in the Senate by Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) and last month in the House by Reps. Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.) and John Spratt (D-S.C.)
Skelton said the new bill he and supporters plan to introduce Monday has “three significant new concepts” intended to improve the process of acquiring major weapons programs.
One concept is to require the secretary of defense to designate an official as the department’s principal expert on performance assessment in acquisition who will provide unbiased assessments of how successful acquisition programs are, he said.
Skelton said the bill also calls for certain programs to enter “intensive care for sick programs,” where they will receive additional scrutiny, reviews, and oversight.
Third, the measure would require the Pentagon to set up a system to track the cost growth and schedule changes that happen to programs before the Milestone B stage, Skelton said.
He announced the bill with HASC Ranking Member John McHugh (R-N.Y.), as well as Rep. Robert Andrews (D-N.J.) and Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas), the heads of the HASC’s Panel on Defense Acquisition Reform (Defense Daily, March 10).
Skelton, in comparing the HASC bill to the McCain-Levin measure, said 25 percent of the proposals are the same, 50 percent are “overlapping,” and 25 percent of the provisions in the HASC bill are unique to it.
According to a summary, the new bill would:
- require an official within the Office of the Secretary of Defense serve as the principal adviser for setting requirements, crafting budgets, and conducting some acquisition-oversight functions;
- mandate the officials responsible for cost estimation, systems engineering, and performance assessment to create new policies and procedures;
- require the director of defense research and engineering to periodically review and assess the technological maturity and integration risk of critical technologies in major acquisition programs;
- have combatant commanders deliver input on formulating joint military requirements to the Joint Requirements Oversight Council;
- mandate each major acquisition program’s strategy include the option for competition throughout the effort’s lifecycle, and that measures such as competitive prototyping, dual sourcing, and use of modular open architectures are used;
- require the milestone-decision authority to annually review major acquisition programs that received Milestone B approvals with waivers of requirements;
- change how programs are reviewed after breaching cost-growth limits defined in the Nunn-McCurdy law; and
- compel the Department of Defense to take steps to reduce organizational conflicts of interest in major program acquisitions.
Meanwhile, the Weapon Systems Acquisition Reform Act of 2009 is proceeding in the Senate. It was sent to the Senate floor after the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) marked it up and amended it on April 2 (Defense Daily, April 3). Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) told congressional reporters yesterday it is one of the bills he hopes to bring up soon for floor debate.
“We have to do something about procurement, which is vital to the Defense Department, defense of this country,” Reid said.
Levin, the SASC chairman, also told reporters Tuesday the Senate bill was nearing floor consideration. He said it should not be folded into the defense authorization bill later this year.
“I don’t think we can wait,” Levin said. “We want to get it going.”
McCain is the SASC ranking member, and Tauscher and Spratt are senior HASC members. Spratt, the House Budget Committee chairman, also is a co-sponsor of the new HASC bill announced yesterday, Skelton said.