Congress pushes back on parts of DoD’s acquisition reform agenda

Congressional appropriators are backing the Pentagon’s push to speed up weapons buying, but warn that speed “must be factored alongside cost, performance, lethality and scalability.”

The House released the final 2026 minibus funding package early Tuesday, which includes money for the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Labor, Education, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation and Health and Human Services. If passed, the bill would increase defense spending to more than $839 billion — roughly $8.4 billion above the White House’s fiscal 2026 request. House leaders plan to vote on the package later this week. 

Congressional negotiators said they “strongly support” the Defense Department’s acquisition reforms, but pushed back on the Pentagon’s efforts to seek additional authorities or changes to its budget and appropriations framework until it fixes its internal processes. 

“Rapid delivery of ineffective weapon systems at exorbitant cost will not serve the warfighter well,” the appropriators wrote. 

Lawmakers also raised concerns about joint requirements process reform and deep cuts to the department’s acquisition workforce that could jeopardize its ability to carry out Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s acquisition reform agenda.

Budget flexibility

Hegseth recently unveiled a plan to overhaul the department’s acquisition system — some of those reform proposals made it into the fiscal 2026 defense policy bill, which became law in December.

At the very end of the document, Hegseth instructed the department to “improve budget flexibility.” 

“Where additional authorities are required, the [undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment], in coordination with the military departments, shall develop a legislative engagement plan to ensure Congress is informed of and aligned with proposed reforms requiring any statutory change,” Hegseth wrote. “All actions will comply with applicable statutes, appropriations law, and procurement integrity requirements.”

That language was likely to become a friction point with Congressional leaders, and now appropriators are saying that reforms laid out in Hegseth’s memo are “internal in nature,” and that the Defense Department needs to “demonstrate progress on these internal procedures and administrative measures” before pursuing additional budget flexibility.

For instance, lawmakers said above-threshold transfer and reprogramming requests are often slowed because “a significant amount of the subcommittees’ time is consumed by waiting for the department to provide requested additional details and justification for these requests.”

“Providing this information alongside the submission of the request would accelerate consideration and create a nimbler process without altering existing authority or reprogramming thresholds,” the appropriators said.

Congressional leaders urged the department’s comptroller and the services’ assistant secretaries to work with the House and Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittees to improve the amount of detail and justification provided in reprogramming submissions.

Congress gave the department some budget flexibility in 2024 but stopped short of granting broader authorities the department and reform advocates have been seeking that would allow DoD to move money more freely within its accounts without explicit congressional approval.

The Defense Department has also been pushing to change the hardware-centric budgeting model Congress uses to plan and execute the Pentagon’s spending by moving away from the traditional “colors of money” tied to different phases of weapons development. And while DoD has run several pilot projects to test the idea, lawmakers have been hesitant to authorize broader adoption of the approach due to the department’s inability to provide Congress with sufficient data showing the new approach would be more effective than traditional appropriation practices.

“To date, the agreement observes no new or compelling justification or quantitative analysis to support proposals that would alter the current appropriations framework, including with respect to reprogramming thresholds, notification requirements, new start guidelines, or consolidation into a single color of money,” the appropriators said.

“Consideration of legislative changes to the appropriations structure is premature until the Department has demonstrated full and effective use of its existing flexibilities and addressed persistent internal delays,” they added.

Army’s agile funding request rejected

While appropriators approved all 13 budget line-item consolidations requested by the Army in its fiscal 2026 budget, they flatly rejected the Army’s “agile funding” request to raise notification threshold for reprogramming or transfers from $15 million to $50 million for procurement programs and to $25 million for research and development efforts.

“The Department already has sufficient authorities to restructure its internal programming and budgeting processes, and many current challenges with execution can be solved by actions within the Department and do not require statutory change or congressional intervention … Increasing reprogramming thresholds alone is unlikely to improve program execution. Decisions to unilaterally move funding in the year of execution without sufficient oversight introduce uncertainty to both the programs impacted and the industrial base, increasing the risk of development and procurement delays,” the appropriators said.

“The House and Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittees discourage the secretary of defense and the service secretaries from submitting future requests of this nature,” they added.

Joint requirements reform risks

The Defense Department kicked off the process of dismantling its decades-old Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS) process last year — and Hegseth ordered the Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC), which oversees the process, to stop validating service-level requirements to the “maximum extent permitted by law.”

House and Senate appropriators said they support the reform but want more detail on how defense officials plan to mitigate potential risks, such as the military services potentially prioritizing service-specific solutions over joint ones or top-down decision-making stifling bottom-up innovation.

The deputy secretary of defense, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and service secretaries have 60 days to brief appropriators on how they plan to address those risks. 

Workforce is the linchpin of acquisition reform

DoD leaders have long warned that the depth of this administration’s workforce cuts could cripple the department’s ability to execute Hegseth’s acquisition reforms.

Appropriators echoed those concerns, saying they are “concerned that recent reductions to the acquisition workforce, the effects of which have yet to be realized, will negatively affect the Department of Defense’s ability to achieve the initial speed and agility sought by this reform effort.”

Lawmakers directed the defense secretary along with service secretaries to submit an acquisition workforce strategy, including a comprehensive assessment of the personnel needed to execute Hegseth’s and Congress’ proposed acquisition reforms.

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