The Army is reexamining the cases of at least 73 soldiers who it kicked out under other-than-honorable circumstances between 2009 and 2015 because it may have run afoul of a federal law intended to help ensure troops aren’t punished for mental health issues that were actually caused by their military service.

At issue is a provision in the 2010 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that requires all the military branches to consider whether service-connected behavioral health might have played a role in whatever misconduct officials are using as their reasoning for separating a military member.

Any service member who’s served in a combat zone in the previous two years and who’s also been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress or traumatic brain injury is supposed to receive additional scrutiny before commanders discharge him or her for a law or rule violation — particularly since a less-than-honorable discharge makes them ineligible for mental health treatment or any other veterans benefits.

Eric Fanning, the secretary of the Army, formally notified Congress in an Aug. 25 letter that the service had identified a total of 394 soldiers who had PTSD or TBI diagnoses in their medical records, were sent home with less-than-honorable discharges and had deployed to serve in contingency operations sometime in the 24 months before they were kicked out. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) released the letter late last week.

Of those 394, an internal audit identified 73 cases where there was no evidence that commanders even considered whether PTSD or TBI was a factor in the underlying offense that prompted their discharge.

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Defense Department spending on research and development has suffered historic declines during the budget drawdown that’s been in progress since 2009, falling much more sharply than the rest of DoD contracts, and reversing the usual pattern in which the military has tended to guard its R&D funding so it has systems ready-to-procure the next time it goes to war.

The insights came last week via one of the deep dives the Center for Strategic and International Studies regularly conducts into federal procurement data. The center found dollars spent on R&D contracts fell by 53 percent between 2009 and 2015 even while overall contract spending declined by only 35 percent.

Put in terms of its share of a shrinking pie, R&D makes up just 8 percent of Defense contracts now, compared to 11 percent five years ago.

Researchers said the spending cuts had created a significant “trough” in funding for future weapons systems, something top Pentagon officials had warned about in 2013, when the sharpest R&D declines started to take place because of the Budget Control Act.

“This was a matter of some dispute as we went into sequestration — was this going to happen? Well, the data shows it happened,” said Andrew Hunter, the director of CSIS’ Defense Industrial Initiatives group, and who previously served as chief of staff to the Pentagon’s undersecretary for acquisition, technology and logistics. “And when you consider that R&D was not something that was heavily paid for by war funding, it really is almost entirely a function of sequestration and the Budget Control Act.”

The new figures indicate that DoD officials have been somewhat successful in at least protecting the department’s investments in very early-stage R&D — the basic and applied research that might lead to scientific breakthroughs that eventually make their way into weapons systems. Those “seed corn” accounts fell only about as much as the rest of DoD’s contract obligations.

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Careful watchers of the Defense Department Inspector General’s website will have noticed that over the last few months, the IG has been posting public summaries or redacted versions of its classified or “for official use only” reports — sometimes on the same day the full versions are released to the folks with security clearances.

Records management nerds know this practice as “proactive disclosure,” and under the FOIA Improvements Act, it’s something all agencies are supposed to do if they’ve gotten a request for the same records at least three times.

The DoD IG deserves credit for going one step further via a newly published policy that requires its staff to turn even its classified reports into a publicly-releasable format if doing so is at all possible —  without waiting for anyone to ask for them via the Freedom of Information Act.

It’s a significant change, because until recently, most reports were withheld in their entirety if they contained even a nugget of information that someone in the military, at some point in the investigation, had marked “for official use only.” Yes, a redacted version might have been released several months later, but that was usually in response to a FOIA demand.

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It’s been more than a year since the Defense Department published final rules meant to protect servicemembers from predatory loans – rules that came after three years of study and public comment. But seven major trade groups representing banks and credit unions say their members haven’t had enough time to prepare, that it’s mostly DoD’s fault, and that enforcement of the regulations needs to be delayed by at least six more months.

The rule DoD published last July was designed to close several loopholes that lawmakers and Defense officials said left military members vulnerable to unsavory tactics by payday lenders, title loan shops and electronics kiosks that tended to cluster around military bases. The rules expanded the Military Lending Act and its 36 percent interest rate caps to cover almost every flavor of consumer credit.

Even though traditional financial institutions weren’t the main target, they complained almost immediately that the rules were too vague and didn’t give them enough guidance on what they needed to do to avoid running afoul of them. The Defense Department responded just a week ago with a detailed list of 19 questions and answers interpreting its own regulation. The banking industry says that doesn’t leave nearly enough time for its members to get their systems in order before Oct. 3, when the rules actually take effect.

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Last week, the Defense Department appointed 18 members to yet another advisory committee to study the acquisition system. But this one has a much more specific (and arguably more difficult) task than the blue ribbon panels that have come in the decades before it. They’ll study every acquisition regulation ever written that still applies to DoD and its contractors, determine where it came from, and decide whether it still makes any sense.

It’s a gargantuan task, which is why Congress gave the Advisory Panel on Streamlining and Codifying Acquisition Regulations two years and some resources to finish its job. The National Defense University and Defense Acquisition University will serve as sponsors, and the legislation that set up the panel allowed DoD to use its Defense Acquisition Workforce Development Fund to pay for the committee’s work.

By the third quarter of 2018, the “Section 809” panel is supposed to deliver Congress a report detailing whether each regulation should be kept as-is, changed, or repealed. To make those determinations, members are supposed to use four broad criteria, asking whether the regulations:

• Establish and administer appropriate buyer and seller relationships in the procurement system
• Improve the functioning of the acquisition system
• Ensure the continuing financial and ethical integrity of defense procurement programs
• Protect the best interests of the Department of Defense

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On Friday afternoon, the Government Accountability Office released its full legal decision in the ENCORE III case we reported on a month ago. That’s the case in which GAO agreed with two large vendors that that DoD’s $17.5 billion solicitation for IT services was flawed and needed to be rewritten.

The decision sheds a lot of additional light on the reasons for GAO’s decision, and interestingly, as the contract arbiter sees things, the main problem with ENCORE III wasn’t strictly that the Defense Information Systems Agency wanted to award spots on the ten-year contract on a lowest-price technically acceptable (LPTA) basis, a complaint industry groups had been making for months leading up to the release of the final request for proposals.

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Air Force senior leaders routinely point out that their service is the busiest it’s been in decades. They’ve now decided to partially compensate by scaling back duties that aren’t exactly core warfighting functions.

In a Thursday memo, Deborah Lee James, the Air Force secretary and Gen. David Goldfein, the Air Force chief of staff, ordered the reduction or outright elimination of the 29 out of the 61 collateral duties performed by uniformed airmen today.

“We have heard your concerns and frustration on the issue of additional duties that compete with accomplishing our primary Air Force missions,” they wrote. “Operational demands are at unprecedented levels, yet our force us smaller than it ever has been. In meeting with Airmen at installations around the globe, we have heard consistently that additional duties assigned at the unit level affect our ability to focus on core missions, which in turn impacts our readiness.”

The collateral duties the Air Force is cutting back were picked by an “Airmen’s Time” task force whose job was to determine which ones are required by statute or the Office of Personnel Management and which are in the Air Force’s control to change. Some of the 29 tasks will be transferred to civilians or contractors, some were deemed to be outdated, and some, officials decided, simply don’t require a uniformed airman to be trained and designated at every single Air Force unit.

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Editor’s note: An earlier version of this post incorrectly indicated that DoD had missed its competition goals in each year since 2010. The department did achieve its goal in fiscal 2014. 

This week marks the two-year point since the Defense Department — worried that only 56.5 percent of its contracted dollars involved a meaningful competition between two or more vendors — issued a series of corrective actions to reverse a downward slide that’s been ongoing for nearly a decade.

So far, the results are not encouraging.

Data published by the Office of Defense Procurement and Acquisition Policy shows things have gotten worse, not better since those orders were signed. In each quarter of fiscal 2016 thus far, DoD’s overall competition rate has been below 50 percent, meaning something dramatic would have to happen in the fourth quarter for the department to meet its goal of 57 percent for the year.

Otherwise, 2016 will be the eighth consecutive year in which the percentage of Defense contract dollars with more than one bidder has declined compared to the year before. It will also be the fifth time out of the last six years in which the department will have missed its annual competition goals even as the goalposts have moved back.

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In the initial phases of what the Defense Department says will be a multi-year effort to stand up its new Cyber Excepted Service, DoD will ask around 3,000 current employees to move from the traditional civil service system to one that offers them fewer job protections but might also boost their pay and promotion prospects.

Congress gave DoD broad new authorities to create a new pay and personnel system outside of the Title 5 regime that governs most of the federal workforce as part of the 2016 Defense authorization bill, believing DoD needed more flexibility to hire and fire personnel so that it could attract and retain the best and brightest. The law gives the department something close to carte blanche to create the new Cyber Excepted Service, so long as the department keeps Congress posted on what it’s up to.

As to new hires, the Pentagon sees the new authorities as especially helpful in creating the new National Background Investigation Bureau. That office will fall under the administration of the Office of Personnel Management, but DoD is in charge of developing its IT systems and developing NBIB’s cybersecurity personnel.

“I think we’ll begin hiring by around Oct. 1 for some of the initial cyber excepted force, because some of our exceptions have to do with what we’re working on with OPM to build a more secure background investigation system,” Terry Halvorsen, the DoD chief information officer, said Thursday.

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Two weeks ago in this space, we noted it was a near-certainty that losing bidders would file protests against the newly-awarded contracts to manage DoD’s TRICARE health system — not necessarily because the government did anything wrong, but because these are massive contracts, even by Pentagon standards.

What we failed to imagine was that TRICARE contract protests are now so inevitable that a company might want to file one even if they’re one of the winners. That, in fact, happened just before the close of business on Friday, when Health Net Federal Services lodged a complaint with the Government Accountability Office, joining two losing bidders — UnitedHealth and Wellpoint — who protested the TRICARE decisions earlier in the week.

In the July. 21 contract announcement, DoD picked Health Net to run TRICARE’s West region out of a field of three companies that bid for that part of the T-2017 contracts. But in its GAO filing, the company effectively argued that it should have been awarded the East region instead (the government’s request for proposals only allows a company to manage one region at a time).

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