Congressional appropriators are backing the Pentagon’s push to speed up weapons buying, but warn that speed “must be factored alongside cost, performance, lethality and scalability.”

The House released the final 2026 minibus funding package early Tuesday, which includes money for the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Labor, Education, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation and Health and Human Services. If passed, the bill would increase defense spending to more than $839 billion — roughly $8.4 billion above the White House’s fiscal 2026 request. House leaders plan to vote on the package later this week. 

Congressional negotiators said they “strongly support” the Defense Department’s acquisition reforms, but pushed back on the Pentagon’s efforts to seek additional authorities or changes to its budget and appropriations framework until it fixes its internal processes. 

“Rapid delivery of ineffective weapon systems at exorbitant cost will not serve the warfighter well,” the appropriators wrote. 

Lawmakers also raised concerns about joint requirements process reform and deep cuts to the department’s acquisition workforce that could jeopardize its ability to carry out Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s acquisition reform agenda.

Budget flexibility

Hegseth recently unveiled a plan to overhaul the department’s acquisition system — some of those reform proposals made it into the fiscal 2026 defense policy bill, which became law in December.

At the very end of the document, Hegseth instructed the department to “improve budget flexibility.” 

“Where additional authorities are required, the [undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment], in coordination with the military departments, shall develop a legislative engagement plan to ensure Congress is informed of and aligned with proposed reforms requiring any statutory change,” Hegseth wrote. “All actions will comply with applicable statutes, appropriations law, and procurement integrity requirements.”

That language was likely to become a friction point with Congressional leaders, and now appropriators are saying that reforms laid out in Hegseth’s memo are “internal in nature,” and that the Defense Department needs to “demonstrate progress on these internal procedures and administrative measures” before pursuing additional budget flexibility.

For instance, lawmakers said above-threshold transfer and reprogramming requests are often slowed because “a significant amount of the subcommittees’ time is consumed by waiting for the department to provide requested additional details and justification for these requests.”

“Providing this information alongside the submission of the request would accelerate consideration and create a nimbler process without altering existing authority or reprogramming thresholds,” the appropriators said.

Congressional leaders urged the department’s comptroller and the services’ assistant secretaries to work with the House and Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittees to improve the amount of detail and justification provided in reprogramming submissions.

Congress gave the department some budget flexibility in 2024 but stopped short of granting broader authorities the department and reform advocates have been seeking that would allow DoD to move money more freely within its accounts without explicit congressional approval.

The Defense Department has also been pushing to change the hardware-centric budgeting model Congress uses to plan and execute the Pentagon’s spending by moving away from the traditional “colors of money” tied to different phases of weapons development. And while DoD has run several pilot projects to test the idea, lawmakers have been hesitant to authorize broader adoption of the approach due to the department’s inability to provide Congress with sufficient data showing the new approach would be more effective than traditional appropriation practices.

“To date, the agreement observes no new or compelling justification or quantitative analysis to support proposals that would alter the current appropriations framework, including with respect to reprogramming thresholds, notification requirements, new start guidelines, or consolidation into a single color of money,” the appropriators said.

“Consideration of legislative changes to the appropriations structure is premature until the Department has demonstrated full and effective use of its existing flexibilities and addressed persistent internal delays,” they added.

Army’s agile funding request rejected

While appropriators approved all 13 budget line-item consolidations requested by the Army in its fiscal 2026 budget, they flatly rejected the Army’s “agile funding” request to raise notification threshold for reprogramming or transfers from $15 million to $50 million for procurement programs and to $25 million for research and development efforts.

“The Department already has sufficient authorities to restructure its internal programming and budgeting processes, and many current challenges with execution can be solved by actions within the Department and do not require statutory change or congressional intervention … Increasing reprogramming thresholds alone is unlikely to improve program execution. Decisions to unilaterally move funding in the year of execution without sufficient oversight introduce uncertainty to both the programs impacted and the industrial base, increasing the risk of development and procurement delays,” the appropriators said.

“The House and Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittees discourage the secretary of defense and the service secretaries from submitting future requests of this nature,” they added.

Joint requirements reform risks

The Defense Department kicked off the process of dismantling its decades-old Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS) process last year — and Hegseth ordered the Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC), which oversees the process, to stop validating service-level requirements to the “maximum extent permitted by law.”

House and Senate appropriators said they support the reform but want more detail on how defense officials plan to mitigate potential risks, such as the military services potentially prioritizing service-specific solutions over joint ones or top-down decision-making stifling bottom-up innovation.

The deputy secretary of defense, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and service secretaries have 60 days to brief appropriators on how they plan to address those risks. 

Workforce is the linchpin of acquisition reform

DoD leaders have long warned that the depth of this administration’s workforce cuts could cripple the department’s ability to execute Hegseth’s acquisition reforms.

Appropriators echoed those concerns, saying they are “concerned that recent reductions to the acquisition workforce, the effects of which have yet to be realized, will negatively affect the Department of Defense’s ability to achieve the initial speed and agility sought by this reform effort.”

Lawmakers directed the defense secretary along with service secretaries to submit an acquisition workforce strategy, including a comprehensive assessment of the personnel needed to execute Hegseth’s and Congress’ proposed acquisition reforms.

If you would like to contact this reporter about recent changes in the federal government, please email anastasia.obis@federalnewsnetwork.com or reach out on Signal at (301) 830-2747.

The post Congress pushes back on parts of DoD’s acquisition reform agenda first appeared on Federal News Network.

Lawmakers said the fiscal 2026 defense policy bill that became law earlier this month would deliver “the most significant acquisition reforms in a generation.” But some of the more sweeping proposals introduced in the House and Senate versions of the bill were ultimately scaled back or dropped entirely from the final version of the legislation.

A similar dynamic played out inside the Pentagon. A draft acquisition memo circulated prior to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s speech to defense executives and senior military acquisition officials outlined a far more aggressive overhaul of how the department would develop and buy military capabilities than what emerged in the final version of the memo and the Acquisition Transformation Strategy.

But a number of provisions from the House’s SPEED Act and Senate’s FoRGED Act that survived negotiations are still expected to be impactful, including measures aimed at streamlining prototyping, accelerating the transition of technologies into production and expanding opportunities for small businesses and new entrants.

Easing regulatory burdens for nontraditional contractors

The bill, for example, exempts nontraditional defense contractors from some of the Pentagon’s accounting, audit and compliance requirements, lowering barriers to entry for new defense technology companies. A nontraditional defense contractor is defined as a contractor that hasn’t held a Cost Accounting Standards-covered contract in the last year, which is the vast majority of the defense industrial base — George Mason’s Baroni Center for Government Contracting estimates that only 7.5 percent of the defense companies fall outside that definition. The Senate also pushed to expand the definition of nontraditional defense contractors, but the provision was dropped from the final version of the bill.

The legislation also expands the type of past performance that may be considered — the department is required to issue guidance on when it should accept a wider range of past performance, including commercial or non-government work as valid past performance. It also requires the Defense Acquisition Regulations Council to “identify and eliminate specific, unnecessary procedural barriers that disproportionately affect the ability of small business concerns and nontraditional defense contractors, to compete for contracts with the Department of Defense.”

Small and medium-sized Defense Department contractors will also gain access to an online platform offering digital resources, training and services aimed at increasing awareness of and facilitating compliance with defense acquisition requirements.

Faster paths from prototype to production

The bill also expands the Pentagon’s ability to use Commercial Solutions Openings — a competitive process used to acquire innovative technologies. CSOs are typically difficult to transition, but the legislation allows the department to move successful CSOs into production, including through sole-source contracts. The provision also expands CSOs to include commercial products, commercial services and nondevelopmental items instead of limiting their use to “innovative” technologies.

Another provision raises the minimum award for the Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies program to $10 million.

The bill also gives combatant commanders the authority to experiment with, prototype and demonstrate new technologies and allows a successful experimentation to serve as justification for moving directly into production. 

Stan Soloway, president and CEO of Celero Strategies and federal acquisition expert, said the provisions aimed at accelerating the transition to production and giving officials clearer authority to favor small businesses and new entrants reflect the department’s long-standing effort to work around traditional program processes and system integrators. But given the complexity of many programs, “it remains to be seen how much it actually changes on major systems, but it could definitely impact smaller ones” he told Federal News Network.

Data rights and IP

At the same time, there is a seeming contradiction in the bill.

Despite broad bipartisan support, right-to-repair provisions were stripped from the final version of the bill, but “provisions like the one that talked about DoD having the authority to re-engineer components when it thinks doing so will be quicker and less expensive than having additional units produced by the original equipment manufacturers, is sure to raise hackles,” Soloway said.

“IP and technical data rights are hugely important issues. And it is fair to say that both government and industry have tended to view them as zero sum games. But if DoD wants to build meaningful bridges to emerging (and existing) firms and technology, the answer lies in both sides being willing to negotiate, at the very beginning of a program, how those questions will be handled. It is hard … but simply stating that DoD can do this when they think it is in their best interests, is probably not the most balanced path forward,” Soloway said.

Workforce largely absent

Despite some of the significant acquisition changes, the legislation barely addresses the workforce — a gap Soloway said could undermine the reforms.

The success of these reforms will hinge on whether the department can equip its workforce with the skills needed to operate differently. Otherwise, the system can quickly revert to its old ways.

“Without an aggressive, broad-based and sustained workforce initiative, it is hard to see the workforce having the tools or the confidence to take the kind of reasoned risks the legislation, and Secretary Hegseth, claim to want them to take,” Soloway said

“Overall, workforce morale and trust in leadership is at a very low ebb. If change is going to happen, dealing with that reality is job one. But, to date, nothing this administration has done would suggest they have any plan on how to do that,” he added.

If you would like to contact this reporter about recent changes in the federal government, please email anastasia.obis@federalnewsnetwork.com or reach out on Signal at (301) 830-2747.

The post NDAA scales back ambitious acquisition reforms, offers little on workforce first appeared on Federal News Network.