Did you know there is an Office of Corrosion Policy and Oversight in the Department of Defense? The position, which Congress created in 2002, reported directly to the under secretary for acquisition, technology, and logistics before that office was split in two, and is responsible, as one would assume from the title, “for the prevention and mitigation of corrosion of the military equipment and infrastructure of the Department of Defense.”
If you haven’t heard of this office, you’re not alone — and Rep. Mac Thornberry, the Texas Republican who chairs the House Armed Services Committee, wants to keep it that way.
Eliminating duplicative and obsolete offices
Tuesday afternoon, Thornberry released “discussion drafts” of two proposed bills that continue his efforts to reform the Pentagon’s acquisition structure. One of those bills, the “Accelerating the Pace of Acquisitions Reform Act of 2018,” would eliminate this office, along with a laundry list of other federal laws that Thornberry believes hamper the department’s ability to acquire goods and services”efficiently and effectively.”
Thornberry’s bill also takes aim at the Office of Performance Assessment and Root Cause Analysis, the Office for Foreign Defense Critical Technology Monitoring and Assessment, and the Office of Technology Transition.
The last one made me dig deeper, because normally when we talk about technology transition, we’re talking about finding a way to incorporate a discovery made during research and development into existing systems, or to transition that discovery into its own program of record. But that doesn’t seem to be what the Office of Technology Transition does. But by statute, the Office of Technology Transition helps find non-defense uses for defense technologies.
I guess that’s not important any longer.
Reforming the Fourth Estate
But the bigger changes are proposed in the second draft bill, the “Comprehensive Pentagon Bureaucracy Reform and Reduction Act.” This act sets its sights on reforming the Pentagon’s “Fourth Estate,” the network of defense agencies and field activities within the DOD.
According to Thornberry, the Fourth Estate accounts for “28 different agencies and field activities, about 20 percent of DOD’s budget, about 25 percent of DOD’s people.” The bill seeks to achieve a 25 percent reduction in the cost of operating these agencies by 2021. That equates to as much as $25 billion.
Most significantly, the bill would eliminate the Defense Information Systems Agency, the office under the DoD’s chief information officer responsible for overseeing the departments computer networks. Headquartered at Fort Meade, Md., DISA employs more than 8,000 military and civilian personnel.
The department would transfer its network operations to U.S. Cyber Command.
Also targeted for elimination are the Defense Human Resources Activity, the Defense Technology Security Administration, the Defense Technical Information Center, the Office of Economic Adjustment, the Test Resource Management Center, and Washington Headquarters Services, which manages the Pentagon Reservation.
Thornberry’s discussion drafts are only preliminary, but based on past practice, they will find their way into the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019. Subcommittees will do their own markups on April 26, and the full committee will consider the “chairman’s mark” draft of the bill on May 9.
Expect the Fourth Estate for fight back — hard. As President Ronald Reagan famously said, “The closest thing to eternal life on earth is a Government Program.” Agencies like DISA and WHS do not go quietly into the night. You can expect pushback not just from the bureaucracy, but from the National Association of Government Workers, the labor union that represents DOD civilian employees.
“NDAA season” just got interesting.
