SPEED Act Procurement Reform

Summary#

This bill, called the SPEED Act, changes how the Department of Defense buys, develops, and supports military systems. It rewrites the stated goals of the defense acquisition system to emphasize faster delivery of capabilities, cost-effectiveness, and use of iterative development. The bill creates or changes many offices and roles, including program executive officers, product support managers, a Joint Requirements Council (renamed), a Requirements, Acquisition, and Programming Integration Directorate (RAPID), and a Mission Engineering and Integration Activity (MEIA). It requires life-cycle sustainment plans for covered systems, pushes modular open system design, and adds rules for data-as-a-service for weapon contracts. The bill also directs reviews and reports on commercial buying practices, cost accounting standards, acquisition thresholds (raising many dollar thresholds), and the defense industrial base. It establishes a Defense Industrial Resilience Consortium, a working group on advanced manufacturing, and a program (BOOST) at the Defense Innovation Unit to help insert commercial technology into programs of record. The bill makes multiple changes to rights in technical data and to other transaction authority rules.

What it means for you#

• If you work in defense acquisition, the bill changes duties, training expectations, and career rules for acquisition staff and creates new roles and offices to speed decisions.
• If you are an industry supplier, the bill seeks more use of commercial products, modular designs, and commercial terms for software and data when appropriate. It also creates a consortium and working groups to address supply chain and manufacturing issues.
• If you are a user or operator in the military, the bill emphasizes earlier user input, iterative development, and life-cycle sustainment plans to help ensure systems meet readiness goals.

Expenses#

No publicly available information. The bill text does not include an overall cost estimate or detailed appropriation amounts for the changes it would require.

Proponents' View#

The bill text presents its goals as speeding delivery of capabilities to the Armed Forces, improving cost-effectiveness, encouraging innovation and commercial solutions, strengthening the domestic industrial base and supply chains, and improving life-cycle sustainment and readiness. It frames new organizations and authorities (for example, RAPID, MEIA, Pathfinders, BOOST, and the Defense Industrial Resilience Consortium) as tools to better align requirements, acquisition, and budgeting to meet operational problems more quickly.

Opponents' View#

No publicly available information. The bill text does not include statements of opposition or formal negative views.