Better Buying Power
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The Pentagon will begin tracking how much time its acquisition managers spend performing and responding to oversight in an effort to remove "non-value-added" processes from the procurement system.
May 28, 2013 -
Army says its implementation of DoD's Better Buying Power directives saved hundreds of millions of dollars last year, but this year's budget chaos will undo much of the progress.
February 22, 2013 -
The Pentagon releases Better Buying Power 2.0 with a new focus on professionalizing the procurement workforce. The updated program includes seven major focus areas with 36 initiatives. Ashton Carter, the deputy secretary of Defense, said version 2.0 takes the lessons learned and data from the last two years to further improve efficiency and cost savings of DoD procurement.
November 14, 2012 -
Federal News Radio Executive Editor Jason Miller live-tweeted the remarks from Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Frank Kendall who unveiled the new acquisition strategy.
November 13, 2012 -
Should-cost management and affordability-cap elements of acquisition overhaul have worked well, DoD's acquisition chief says. But workforce has overreacted to Pentagon's urging toward more fixed-price contracts.
September 20, 2012 -
Steven Grundman, a Lund Fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C., and former deputy undersecretary of Defense for Industrial Affairs, provides his perspective on how the Better Buying Power initiative has shaped DoD procurement.
June 11, 2012 -
The Pentagon says the way it buys certain commercial products has been abused for more than a decade. The Defense Department asked Congress to include new rules for buying commercial-of-a-type products, which are commercial in nature, but the military is the only or largest customer by far. Industry was pleased to see the House Armed Services Committee not include the change in the Defense authorization bill.
May 14, 2012 -
A year and a half after embarking on a strategy designed to get more bang for DoD's acquisition bucks, the Pentagon is still struggling to instill the idea that programs should be managed to what they should cost, rather than what they cost today.
April 30, 2012 -
Even though a short era of ever-increasing military budgets has come to a close, Pentagon leaders said Monday their quest to find savings in defense spending is not aimed at reducing the profitability of contractors.
July 19, 2011