The Department of Defense has made progress on a number of acquisition reforms that Congress has pushed for in previous National Defense Authorization Acts, a June 6 government watchdog report said. However, more details on program oversight are needed to determine how successful those reform efforts will be. In a new report titled “DOD Acquisition Reform: Leadership Attention Needed to Effectively Implement Changes to Acquisition Oversight,” the Government Accountability Office (GAO) expressed satisfaction with some of the department’s efforts to implement suggested reforms. But it also noted that some issues – such as the roles and responsibilities of different offices for acquisition oversight – could still use some work. The Defense Department has successfully shifted oversight and decision-making authority of numerous major programs down from the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) to military departments. The GAO report noted that in 2012, 39 major defense acquisition programs had OSD as the decision-making authority and 44 were decided at the service level; by March 2019, only nine programs maintained OSD-level decision-making authority while 80 programs were evaluated at the military department level.
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