The House Armed Services Committee yesterday, unanimously passed H.R. 4435, The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2015. It is expected to be considered by the full house later this month. Of course, the Senate is proceeding with its own version of the bill and ultimately, differences will need to be worked out in a conference committee.
This year, the Committee's "markup" of the NDAA does not have as much in it that would be termed controversial or likely to impact a great number of contractors. For the past two years, compensation has been front and center as has been audit access to contractor internal audit reports. This year, none of that.
One thing we did note that will be of importance to contractors in the "service contracting" business is an $800 million drop in spending from the prior year. That's fairly sizable. Perhaps the war fighters will be performing their own barracks maintenance in 2015.
The House does seem to be interested in service contracts. Besides the drop in funding, there was this statement:
Acquisition Reform: Vice Chairman Thornberry’s acquisition reform effort aims to identify and drive out those disincentives that increase cost and schedule of major programs and delay delivery of capabilities to the warfighter. Additionally, the reform effort identifies services contracting as an area where major improvements can be made. While the FY08 NDAA established the requirement for an annual inventory of services contracts, the Department has yet to fully implement this requirement. The Chairman’s Mark encourages the Secretary to improve data collection for services contracting and conduct better analysis of the data to identify waste. GAO is tasked to report on opportunities to improve services contract processes.We're not sure what kind of reforms they have in mind. Certainly compiling an inventory of service contracts isn't going to reform anything.
Stay tuned to these pages as we will be keeping you up-to-date on the NDAA's progression.
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