Yesterday, Congress took an important, yet imperfect, step forward with overhauling the Defense Department’s major weapons acquisition process. The House Armed Services Committee moved a reform bill, the Weapons Acquisition System Reform Through Enhancing Technical Knowledge and Oversight (WASTE TKO) Act, through mark-up by a 59-0 margin.
A similar acquisition reform bill introduced by Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) unanimously passed the full Senate. Before passage of the bill, however, senators agreed to an amendment that essentially nullifies the purpose of acquisition review.
The amendment, introduced by Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), requires the Pentagon to consider the economic impact on the industrial base of weapon acquisition decisions. As aptly pointed out by the Project on Government Oversight yesterday, this rule prevents the Defense Department from making a major weapons acquisition decision – say to cancel an obsolete warplane – that negatively impacts the country’s industrial base. Of course any cancellation of a major weapon system is going to produce job losses, so this amendment would help to prevent any future termination of a weapons program, no matter how high the cost overruns go, or how obsolete the program is.
Conference members who hash out the differences between the House and Senate versions of these bills in the coming weeks need to remove this amendment from the final product. Congressional members may bitterly cling to defense contracting jobs out of parochial interests, but defense spending is one of the least efficient uses of government money to create jobs, and the rampant waste, fraud, and abuse within Defense Department spending must be addressed if this country’s record deficits are to come down. That starts with legitimately reforming the way the Pentagon invests in and purchases major weapons programs.
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