Pentagon acquisition chief Frank Kendall brought a package of legislative proposals to the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday, telling the lawmakers during a hearing on “improving DoD’s ability to respond to the pace of technological change” that simplifying acquisition rules and eliminating burdensome reporting requirements would allow program managers to yield better results.
“At the end of the day, a great deal of it is about not dumping rules in place that constrain people, but getting people to a place where they can make better decisions and do the right thing,” Kendall said at the committee’s first hearing of the year.
Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), who took on acquisition reform as a top priority more than a year ago, has said repeatedly that his goal is to thin out the rulebook, not add to or replace existing laws.
Kendall told reporters during a break in the hearing that “the intent of the legislative proposals in general is to simplify the lives of our program managers.” Program managers are constantly submitting reports to other offices in the Pentagon, to Congress, to other government offices –all in the name of oversight–but some of these reports are duplicative and ultimately don’t benefit anyone despite the effort poured into them. Lawmakers continue to add to these rules every year while working on the defense authorization bill–someone with concerns about a program’s performance or cost will demand greater congressional oversight, which almost always equates to the program manager sending another report to Congress.
In addition to the duplicative reporting requirements, laws have been enacted that give power to or tie the hands of different offices involved in acquisition, resulting in a web of disparate rules.
“It’s very inside baseball if you read them, it’s all about the detailed rules our program managers have to follow,” Kendall said of his legislative proposal. “What motivated me to do this is when we re-did 5000.02, our DoD instruction on acquisition, there’s an enclosure–Enclosure 1, I think–that’s table after table after table of all the rules people have to follow, and all the different types of programs, and what rules apply to what types of programs. And the complexity of that was mind-boggling to me. So we really have to simplify this.”
Before bringing his ideas to HASC, Kendall said his team did some case studies, submitted them for review by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, and circulated the ideas throughout the Defense Department. The consensus is “they’re going to make a difference, they’re going to relieve a lot of burden.”
After the hearing, Thornberry said that he would have to take a careful look at the proposals, but based on Kendall’s testimony he’s optimistic about this effort.
“I think it’s a big deal that he was able to bring them to us before the budget was released,” Thornberry said. “It is significant to me that he says they will make a significant difference. And as I understood what he was talking about, it goes along the line of simplifying and thinning out regulations, which also assists in accountability–the more complicated a system is, the harder to know it is who to hold accountable for the outcomes. So I’m really hopeful.”