House begins work on Defense authorization bill
It’s that familiar time of year again: Trees budding, woodpeckers pecking, the smell of fresh rain on the spring soil, and Congress summarily dismissing the Pentagon’s requests for base closures.
Not that it was unexpected, but language explicitly barring another BRAC round appeared last week in the House readiness subcommittee’s contribution to the annual Defense authorization bill. The full House Armed Services Committee will begin to mark up the bill this week.
However, if the subcommittee’s language survives the full legislative process, Congress’ view on BRAC will have softened from “No, never, don’t even study it,” to “Maybe later.” The legislation would order DoD to draw up a 20-year plan that compares the force structure it expects to have with the precise categories of infrastructure it will need, indicating that lawmakers might be willing to consider some infrastructure consolidations once the department identifies where the excesses are in more granular detail.
Bearing in mind that we’re still in the earliest stage of the annual NDAA process, here are a few other items of note from the subcommittee markups released and approved this week:
- The personnel subcommittee approved language that would reject DoD proposals to cut the rate of growth in service members’ housing allowances and reduce commissary subsidies, but endorsed reforms to the retirement system along the lines the Military Compensation and Retirement Modernization Commission recommended earlier this year. That plan would mix DoD’s 20- year pension plan with government matching contributions to the Thrift Savings Plan for all active duty service members.
- The same subcommittee resurrected a longstanding proposal to create a unified medical command combining the health care administrative functions of the three military departments. DoD created the joint Defense Health Agency in 2013, but that organization is mainly charged with creating shared services for the three departments, and left the three departments’ surgeons general largely in charge of running their own organizations.
- DoD and VA would be ordered to create a joint formulary that unifies the lists of prescription drugs covered by their health systems, particularly for pain control, sleep disorder and psychiatric medications commonly given to transitioning wounded warriors. Service members have commonly reported experiences with having a successful medication regime established by their DoD clinicians, only to find that some of those medicines aren’t covered in VA’s formulary once they leave the military.
- GAO would begin a new project to identify “single points of failure” within DoD’s supply chain. Lawmakers are becoming increasingly concerned that too many key weapons systems are getting to the point where they rely on parts that are only made by one manufacturer, especially as the military’s systems get older and rely on increasingly-rare boutique subsystems.
- Congress wants better information on the skills needed by DoD’s acquisition workforce. The department already must submit a plan every two years that identifies the most critical skills and competencies for all of its civilians. New language would require that plan to also account for the impact of changing procurement rules on its acquisition workforce in particular.
Again, the above provisions are just a handful of the contributions the HASC subcommittees made to this year’s process. There’s much more to come on Wednesday, when the full committee will begin its usual marathon session of debate and amendments. That session will also include Chairman Mac Thornberry’s (R-Texas) forthcoming “full committee mark,” which is expected to also include the latest version of his acquisition reform proposal. He introduced a discussion draft of the acquisition language a month ago so that members and outside organizations could offer their comments, and many have.
Senators ask Carter to probe alleged retaliation against former DISA comptroller
Up until 2013, Jimaye Sones was the top financial official at the Defense Information Systems Agency. Today, his sole job appears to be sitting on an obscure Pentagon working group on accounting software, and a pair of senators suspect it’s not because he was a bad comptroller.
On Thursday, Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Mark Warner (D-Va.) wrote to Defense Secretary Ash Carter asking him to launch an investigation into possible whistleblower retaliation, saying the senior executive’s reassignments appear to coincide with his investigation and reporting of possible financial irregularities within the organization.
The first was in 2013, when Sones, who had been DISA comptroller since 2005, reported a possible Anti-Deficiency Act violation to agency and Pentagon officials. The senators and Sones’ attorneys say he’d discovered what appeared to a negative $323 million balance in DISA’s 2012 working capital fund.
Shortly thereafter, he was removed from the comptroller job and reassigned as the agency’s inspector general. But in the meantime, the agency’s new financial leadership had tried to fix the accounting problems with what Sones believed were inappropriate methods, so he asked his deputy IG to investigate whether they violated DoD rules. According to his attorneys, Sones was reassigned again almost immediately, this time to an information security post, and eventually, in February, to the Pentagon software study group.
“We urge you to have the appropriate official in your office examine all the facts bearing on Mr. Sones’ recent reassignments and to make a determination as to the appropriateness of his treatment,” Grassley and Warner wrote, noting that his employment history appears to be free of any “adverse reports” that would explain the reassignments.
In 2011, Sones oversaw DISA’s first-ever clean audit opinion, an achievement that relatively few Defense components have accomplished and which the agency trumpeted at the time. However, the DoD inspector general later criticized the methodology the agency’s independent auditors used, saying it wasn’t performed in accordance with accounting standards.
DISA’s public affairs office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the retaliation claim.
Sones also has a case pending before the Office of Special Counsel, which investigates whistleblower retaliation claims against federal employees, his attorneys said.
Pentagon seeks to speed up its investigations of official misconduct
When he was still the Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel expressed frustration that investigations into alleged misconduct by DoD officials always seemed to take a very, very long time, delaying his ability to make disciplinary decisions. In complicated cases, it can mean a four-star general accused of wrongdoing is assigned to low-responsibility staff job for more than a year while receiving full pay and benefits, with members of the press asking all the while, “What are you going to do with this guy?”
Hagel’s experiences weren’t just anecdotal, it turns out. According to a review of senior official investigations the Pentagon asked its inspector general to undertake, the average one takes 270 days. The DoD IG believes that average can be cut roughly in half by 2017 if the department follows the recommendations it delivered in a 131-page report marked “for official use only” in November and released publicly last week.
Part of the problem is funding: While the DoD IG and its military service counterparts are supposed to be independent, they’re not immune from budget cuts that have hit nearly every element of the department over the past several years, so the report recommends reversals to the staffing reductions the OIG offices are now facing.
But there are also plenty of things the department’s IG offices can do to smooth the process along by updating their business process, which vary widely from one military service to the next.
The review identified some fairly inefficient ways of tracking complaints, recording data and monitoring a case’s progress, including plenty of ad-hoc Excel spreadsheets. So among other recommendations, the authors recommend that all military IGs adopt the centralized case management system the DoD introduced for its own investigations last year, known as D-CATS.
The DoD IG also recommends more automation throughout the investigative process, more use of standardized forms, and better training for IGs’ various hotline staffs so that they’re better able to identify credible complaints and help push resources to high-priority cases, such as an official who’s awaiting confirmation to another post, or is about to retire from the military.
Navy assigning more high-level attention to small business in all of its programs
C ircling back to an earlier item in this week’s notebook: The military services, like Congress, are concerned about losing their small suppliers, particularly when they provide critical parts that are must-have components of modern weapons systems.
In the Navy’s case, the service has decided to tackle the problem by trying to make sure that it’s focused on small business not just as a headquarters policy matter, but by assigning the number two official within each of its program offices to be the small business advocate for whatever system they’re buying or building.
“Small businesses aren’t on the radar screen for most of our program managers, so we need to put it on the radar screen,” Sean Stackley, the assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week. “Each deputy program manager in the Department of Navy has been assigned the responsibility to be the small business advocate for all things associated with this program, to have a watch on the health of his second tier, lower tier small businesses that are directly affected when we have ebb and flow in terms of cash on a program.”
While those ebbs and flows are a natural part of any acquisition’s lifecycle, Stackley and the other military services’ acquisition chiefs noted they’re seeing some critical suppliers go out of business entirely, in some cases, because they’ve hitched their entire business to one weapon system’s wagon.
“When we change our production rates of if we’re going to shut down production and go into a sustainment mode, we need to understand what that means not just to our primes and major subcontractors, but what’s happening down at that small business level,” Stackley said. “Because quite often, they’re not just unique, they’re the only source. When they go out of business, we have to go offshore.”
Heidi Shyu, the Army’s assistant secretary for acquisition, logistics and technology, said her service has tried to keep some of those critical businesses afloat by continuing to buy more of their parts than they actually need — in one case, building up enough stockpiles to last the Army the next seven years. In other cases, it’s explicitly advising small firms that they need to make themselves less dependent on DoD.
“We told one small company, ‘Hey, you’ve got to diversify. You can’t have all your eggs in our basket, right? That’s very risky.’ So over a period of two years, this particular supplier went from 90 percent dependence on the Army down to 50 percent, because that person diversified into the commercial space.”
