While non-commercial Major Defense Acquisition Programs (MDAPs) will continue, a Wednesday executive order from President Donald Trump states that commercial contracts will be the default for DoD.
Within two months, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is to submit to the White House “a plan to reform the Department of Defense’s acquisition processes that, to the maximum extent possible” includes “utilization of existing authorities to expedite acquisitions throughout the Department of Defense, including a first preference for commercial solutions and a general preference for Other Transactions Authority [OTA], application of Rapid Capabilities Office policies, or any other authorities or pathways to promote streamlined acquisitions under the Adaptive Acquisition Framework,” according to the order.
While commercial solutions do not fit MDAPs, the executive order’s focus on commercial contracts and OTAs as the Pentagon default “fits within their [Trump administration’s] preference,” said Jerry McGinn, the executive director of the Baroni Center for Government Contracting at George Mason University.
“We’re already largely going this way,” he said. “We’re already spending about 35 percent of RDT&E [research, development, test & evaluation] on OT contracts. That’s up from five years ago of zero–a pretty dramatic increase. We sort of have the prototyping thing down. We’ve been doing DIU [Defense Innovation Unit] and [U.S. Air Force] AFWERX for a number of years. The real challenge is transitioning to production and sustainment, and those aren’t really addressed in the [EO] effort.”
The Wednesday executive order also charges Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg “to complete a comprehensive review of the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System [JCIDS] within 180 days…with the goal of streamlining and accelerating acquisition.”
The Pentagon created JCIDS in 2003 under then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. A June, 2022 study on JCIDS “found that the time required for “preparing and validating an Initial Capabilities Document followed by a Capabilities Development Document was an average of 852 days.”
The new Trump EO “focuses on the front end, on requirements, which I think is huge because the JCIDS is a disaster [in] getting things on contract fast, speed, OTs,” McGinn said.
But the big challenge in support for Ukraine or wargames focused on Taiwan, for example, “is production and sustainment,” he said. “We’ve only begun to scratch the surface on those challenges, particularly sustainment.”