Acquisition Reform

The final report of the Defense Department's Acquisition Law Advisory Panel, entitled Streamlining Defense Acquisition Laws, examined more than 600 laws and made specific legislative proposals aimed at streamlining the defense acquisition process. GAO (1) reviewed whether the selection of Panel members and Panel operations fulfilled the relevant legal requirements; (2) analyzed and described the information-gathering and analytical approaches the Panel used; and (3) reviewed the Panel's report and determined the extent to which the report presents opposing, or otherwise differing, views to its recommendations for statutory change. GAO also identified Panel recommendations that would change acquisition laws applicable to all federal agencies or create new inconsistencies in the statutory requirements for Pentagon and civilian agencies' procurements.

GAO found that: (1) the Panel's activities have complied with the requirements of FACA and its authorizing legislation; (2) the Panel has not selected a member to represent a particular segment of the business community; (3) the Panel's six functional and two ad hoc working groups have collected and analyzed information on major procurement statutes and prepared alternative proposals for legislative changes for the Panel's consideration; (4) the working groups have solicited data on the impact of procurement statutes, reactions to proposed changes, and background and policy information from a wide variety of sources; (5) the panelists have based their recommendations for statutory changes on their own expertise in line with the Panel's goals and objectives; (6) the Panel's final report includes differing views on 78 of its recommendations for statutory change and provides in-depth discussion of 30 of them; (7) 55 percent of the recommendations will substantially change DOD or governmentwide procurement statutes or procedures; (8) 26 percent of the recommendations will eliminate outdated or superseded laws, remove statutory inconsistencies and redundancies, and clarify existing statutory language; and (9) 15 percent of the recommendations will bring statutes into conformity with recommended statutory changes.