WASHINGTON, DC – FEBRUARY 08: The exterior of the U.S. Capitol building is seen at sunrise on February 8, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON: The Senate Appropriations Committee has joined a congressional chorus of concern over how the Pentagon is using a new acquisition authority designed to speed up procurement of cutting edge technologies.
In its fiscal 2023 markup, the SAC doubles down on concerns from House and Senate lawmakers, along with the watchdog Government Accountability Office, about the Pentagon’s use of Middle Tier Acquisition (MTA) authorities and other legal provisions that allow streamlined acquisition.
In its language, the SAC decries the use of measures designed for rapid prototyping to instead buy operational systems. While supporting rapid prototyping as a way to speed new capabilities into service kit bags, the committee frets that “prototype units routinely require costly and time-consuming engineering change proposals, increasing costs to the taxpayer and removing the end-item from the unit in question to receive necessary upgrades.”
The SAC bill thus requires that any prototypes developed with special acquisition funds “must be in accordance with an approved test strategy” and not exceed the number of systems approved for testing.
MTA authorities originally were created by Congress in 2016 to allow rapid prototyping and/or rapid fielding of breakthrough technologies in part by waiving certain requirements of federal acquisition law for measuring performance. Under MTA, program managers can forgo a number of oversight activities such as certain planning reports and independent cost assessments. The law specifically limits the lifetime of MTA efforts to five years, unless an extension is granted by senior DoD acquisition executives.
Further, the committee would cut $181 million from the Pentagon’s request for the new Rapid Defense Experimental Research Fund (RDER) of $358 million, saying DoD “does not adequately manage the out-year funding tails associated with successful RDER experiments.”
David Norquist was pentagon comptroller and Deputy Secretary of Defense during the time when MTAs were first implemented in the department. Asked last week if he believed the authorities have been successful, Norquist told Breaking Defense that MTAs “are working” even if there are ways they could be more effective.
“You always have to be careful when we streamline a process,” said Norquist, recently installed as president and CEO of the National Defense Industrial Association. “You get two potentially disruptive side effects, often at the same time. One is you’ll have a group that decides everything’s mid-tier. And so regardless of what your original intent is, they try and fit everything into the box, because they like the flexibility … The flip side is more inside the system, where people add all the old rules back because that’s how they’re familiar with doing acquisition.”
“So you have to, sort of, watch both ends to say when we are given a new authority by Congress, is the Department of Defense [being] consistent with it and actually fully taking advantage of it? I think this has opened up a lot of opportunities and a lot of programs are moving through it. Those are the two things whenever you’re in a leadership position you just have to guard against in order to ensure you’re getting the full results.”
Getting buy-in internally from acquisition professionals for new authorities is always going to be a challenge, Norquist said. To fix that, he said, it’s important to understand why someone in the current system would be reluctant to try something new, especially when there may be “reasonable” concerns that can pop up.
“What I’ve generally found in my time in government is the people that you think of as putting up the roadblocks, they’re not trying to be difficult. They have a different set of incentives, and they’re accountable to different things. And if you haven’t changed that, you shouldn’t be surprised they haven’t changed their behavior,” said Norquist, adding that by design, “We build bureaucracies to do the same thing over and over again.”
