Gates Calls for Forthright, Collegial Budget Discussions
By Jim Garamone
American Forces Press ServiceWASHINGTON, Feb. 25, 2009 – Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has called for forthright, collegial discussions among Defense Department leaders to make tough choices about programs, projects and procurement as the defense portion of the fiscal 2010 federal budget takes shape.
Gates asked those participating in the discussions to sign a nondisclosure agreement because leaks may discourage the free exchange of ideas, Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell said today.“This is highly sensitive stuff, involving programs costing tens of billions of dollars, employing hundreds of thousands of people and go to the heart of our national security,” Morrell said. “He wants this process to be as disciplined and as forthright as possible.”
Gates wants the budget to be judged as a whole, rather than in parts via selective leaks, Morrell said. The secretary thinks the agreement “will create a climate in which you can ultimately produce a better product, as people can speak candidly with the confidence that it will not be leaked,” he added.
The secretary wants the budget to be judged in its totality “because that’s where you will see the strategic balance he is trying to build,” Morrell said.
In testimony before Congress in January, Gates talked about making the hard choices on procurement. Projects that are significantly behind schedule or over budget are more likely to face the budget ax, he said.
Gates called for discipline in the acquisition process and said the department must freeze requirements at contract time.
Big-ticket items are going to go through a very thorough review as part of the fiscal 2010 budget process, Morrell said.
The White House’s Office of Management and Budget is expected to announce top-line budget figures tomorrow, along with a fiscal 2010 war supplement.
Obama wants to stop the supplemental process and transfer the costs for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the base budget, but will not be able to do so this year, Morrell said.
“It’s extremely difficult for us to predict what our level of commitment is going to be in either theater, let alone theaters that we haven’t potentially thought of, God forbid, a year, two years, let alone 10 years from now,” he said. “So we are trying to be as helpful as possible to this process, but some of this stuff is not known at this point.”
Category Archives: Policy
Attention (to the) Deficit
At the state level, there’s been at least a partial sigh of relief over the stimulus package (no…not THAT stimulus package). But now comes the knife–President Obama says he’s going to cut the deficit in half by the end of his term with a combination of tax increases (well, non-renewed tax cuts to wealthier Americans) and budget cuts. The biggest piece of the reduction is predicted to be the savings from the draw-down of troops in Iraq and the resulting reduction in GWOT (that’s Global War On Terror) outlays.
But there’s sure to be some serious slashes elsewhere. Considering the ongoing (and expanding) cost of Afghanistan, and that the Defense budget itself is going to be fairly static for at least the next 2 fiscal years aside from GWOT dollars, there’s going to have to be cutting elsewhere.
Arguably, that could be *good* for government IT spending, because improvements in efficiency through new technology will be key to getting the deficit down in a down economy. But the question is, where to start?
There’s a quick and dirty answer to that: procurement reform. The current approach to developing and purchasing just about anything, but particularly technology, is slow, odious and inefficient.
It’s not that the regulations prevent the government from buying things intelligently– as Charlie Croom said last year in an interview I did with him, “There’s nothing in the FAR that says you have to be stupid.” But there has to be a fundamental change in the culture of development and acquisition–there has to be incentive for reducing scope, investing in real technology standards (de facto, not arbitrary), and increasing flexibility for vendors in solving problems.
A study published by Steve O’Keefe’s Meritalk, Red Hat and DLT suggests that there are billions to be saved in a shift to the latest crop of de-facto standard technologies:
Over three years, the potential savings would be US$3.7 billion for using open-source software; $13.3 billion for using virtualization technologies; and $6.6 billion from cloud computing or software-as-a-service, the study said.
While it’s a vendor study–and a study sponsored by vendors who stand to make money over a shift to open standards and the like–there’s still plenty to chew on there. Sure, there are regulatory hurdles to leap to use some of these technologies, but the main barrier to adopting these approaches is cultural.
Sean M. Gallagher 