First Principles for Congress
Considerations as Congress Moves into Conference For Defense Bills
The four Congressional defense committees published their NDAAs and defense appropriations bills over the summer. In the coming months the Senate and House members will conference to merge their FY24 bills. Obviously the priority is actually passing a defense budget ASAP.
With many positive and negative elements of each bill, members and staff should identify a set of first principles to determine which sections of each bill to advance into the final bills. It should aggressively constrain the bill to top elements only.
You can see our summaries of the bills here:
The challenges with the annual NDAA and non-budget elements of the defense appropriations bills is that while many of the acquisition reforms are well intended, the cumulative legislative technical debt over decades created a massively complex bureaucracy that threatens our national security. Past program failures drove new compliance requirements to ensure future programs didn’t repeat them. This drives additional policies and oversight organizations.
Every year Congressional members, staff, and external groups offer thousands of amendments for the NDAA and defense appropriations bills. Staffs must then track, review, and debate the value of the thousands of good ideas with a subset making the bills. To appease members, especially senior members, the bias is to include hundreds of them. This is likely the biggest reason why NDAAs aren’t passed on time.
The byzantine gauntlet that acquisition programs must run through is a primary reason why it takes 10-15 years to go from idea to IOC. While the biggest threat from China is likely within the next three years, the DoD’s major weapon systems to deter China won’t be delivered until the 2030s.
Guiding Principles
Congressional and defense leaders must agree on a common set of guiding principles for how to strengthen our national security (focused on acquisition). These can be extracted from the National Security Strategy, National Defense Strategy, Congressional leader statements, and industry groups. Elements like:
Enable greater speed of delivery for leading defense capabilities.
Ensure agility to be more responsive to changes in operations, threats, and tech.
Balance speed with rigor to manage risks in operations and acquisition.
Delegate decision authorities while providing greater insight to OSD, Congress.
Encourage more companies to offer leading solutions for national defense.
Validation Questions
For each section of the NDAA and appropriations bills related to defense acquisition, Congressional members and staff should ask themselves:
Does this enable the DoD to deliver better capabilities faster?
With a dynamic national security environment and a growing threat with China that is vastly different from past Middle East wars, DoD must rapidly modernize its forces to deter or defeat adversaries.
Does this add to or reduce the compliance requirements on programs?
Congress should adopt a practice whereby they eliminate at least two legacy compliance requirements for each new one imposed. We need to burn down legislative technical debt. Furthermore, innovators don’t want to work in a complex, heavily regulated bureaucracy. Congress must stop sabotaging rapid acquisition practices with massive certifications and reporting.
Must this be enacted into law or would this better be addressed in DoD policies and guidance?
In some cases, DoD leaders request a statutory requirement to overcome resistance within the department. However most proposed reforms would be better addressed in DoD policies (must do) or guidance (how to adopt best practices). Continued active discussion between Congress and the Pentagon is needed.
Does this encourage or discourage companies from working with DoD?
While China has civil-mil fusion to harness its leading commercial tech for defense, the U.S. Government actively discourages American businesses from supporting national defense with heavy burdens, long timelines, unclear direction, and complex processes. Mr. Speaker, tear down these walls.
Does this encourage or discourage partnering with Allies in defense?
Most stakeholders agree we need to better align our defense strategies, investments, and industries with Allies and partners to strengthen the coalition. Yet AUKUS, Quad, and new trilateral agreements will be theater unless we address ITAR, FMS, and Buy American issues.
As the NDAA and appropriations bills continue to grow by thousands of pages, that drives extensive direction, policies, and reporting across the department. Congress has a constitutional right to provide oversight and ensure proper use of hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars. However recent actions suggest some in Congressional staff see themselves as acquisition decision authorities. There are also blurred lines where appropriation bills seek to dictate acquisition policies and practices. Pentagon leaders often have little bandwidth left to think strategically and enact their own initiatives given the burdens of the current bureaucracy and the annual to-do list from Congress.
I humbly request Congress clearly identify a core set of guiding principles and validation questions like above to review each draft section. While there are many areas to reform and modernize across the DoD, the best thing Congress can do is less. Smaller bills with less statutory direction while sunsetting outdated, low value legacy statutory requirements. This will enable Congress to pass the bills faster and focus DoD energy on a priority set of actions.