New Report on Challenges on Doing Business with DoD

Earlier this week, the House Armed Services Committee's Panel on Business Challenges Within the Defense Industry released their report "Challenges to Doing business with the Department of Defense". This report represents the culmination of six months of work examining the challenges that businesses face when working with the Department of Defense. The Panel met with or heard testimony from more than 150 people from around the country representing government, industry, think tanks, and academia.

The Panel's Chairman, Congressman Shuster stated; "Across the country, we heard the same thing from businesses, academics and researchers: navigating the defense acquisitions process is difficult for all businesses but is particularly difficult for small businesses".

The report outlines a set of recommendations to make the defense acquisition process leaner, less risk adverse, improve business to government relations and embrace emerging technologies. The Panel believes its recommendations are "actionable" and many will be included in this year's defense authorization act. Key recommendations in the report include:

• Requiring the Secretary of Defense, in coordination with the Service Secretaries, to develop a long-term strategy for maintaining a robust and effective defense industrial base.
• Requiring the Secretary of Defense to develop policies and mechanisms to improve communication with industry to better enable industry to allocate independent R&D resources and make investments to meet the future needs of the Department.
• Ensuring that work being reserved for small business performance is actually performed by small businesses.
• Continuing to rebuild the breadth and depth of the defense acquisition workforce which will, in all likelihood, save money and improve acquisition outcomes.
• Simplifying and streamlining the acquisition process by conducting a comprehensive review of the laws and regulations that govern the acquisition process in order to repeal or amend regulations that are outdated or have had unintended consequences that outweigh the original intent of the regulation.

You can read the full report here.