Like the rest of the government, the Army is in the process of rewriting its acquisition regulations. But even before that process is finished, there’s one big change officials say was important enough to make sooner than later: a big reduction in peer reviews. The Army thinks those reviews strayed away from their original intent and added a lot of unnecessary delays to the contracting process.
The Army made some updates to its acquisition regulations last month, including a change that eliminates some of the mandatory peer review processes for procurements. Previously, a solicitation review board and a contract review board were required to approve all procurements worth more than $50 million. Under the simplified regulation, senior acquisition officials have more discretion to decide when formal peer reviews at the Army level are and aren’t necessary.
“We need less process and more thoughtful decision making, and we need to allow our senior contracting officials to determine what types of reviews are needed and when they’re needed,” Kimberly Buehler, the acting deputy assistant secretary of the Army for procurement, said at a recent conference hosted by the Association of the U.S. Army. “That’s how we’re going to be able to go faster. Where is the appropriate place to take risk, and where can we benefit by having a review because it is something different? We often have some expertise in another part of our contracting activity where that type of peer sharing could be helpful, but we don’t need a formal process around that. We can do that without the process that brings 25 people to the table to second guess something that the contracting officer did two weeks before a solicitation is supposed to go out. That’s too late to need. We need to be having those conversations early on and making thoughtful decisions.”
Weeks-long delays in contracting
And often, those peer reviews haven’t been just a simple exercise in box-checking. As part of its process of examining existing regulations, the Army convened an operational planning team to look specifically at parts of the Army Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (AFARS) that were adding unnecessary bureaucratic weight to the procurement process.
What the OPT found is that in certain cases, peer reviews can create serious delays to procurements all by themselves, said Danielle Moyer, the executive director of Army Contracting Command at Aberdeen Proving Ground.
“This was like the worst case scenario, but from pre-award through phase one, two, three, it was like 35 weeks,” she said. “It was 35 additional weeks could be added in the worst case scenario, and that’s a huge amount of time for a contract awards.”
Moyer acknowledged there are potential downsides to cutting back on those reviews — like the possibility of increased bid protests. But she said there are other ways to solve that problem.
“The thought process there could be, ‘Well, you do this and you’re going to get a thousand more protests.’ But I don’t know that keeping additional reviews in place solves the problem. I think our relationship with industry is the most important thing there,” she said. “Since I’ve been in the job, hands down, my most favorite thing is watching my protest numbers go down because [vendors] will call me and tell me if they think something went wrong. There have been multiple times where they were right. And without going through an entire process or time, we were able to take corrective action and fix it ourselves, which saves companies a ton of money and us a ton of resources, because the resources that are then going to be working on protests are the same resources who are not going to be doing another contract action.”
And, Moyer said, avoiding bid protests isn’t a good reason to conduct mandatory peer reviews in and of itself. She says that was not the original intent.
“Peer reviews were always intended to learn from each other. The way they were always intended to be was to learn from another service or another organization to figure out how we could potentially do things better or faster or learn from other services,” she said. “However, we have culturally, at least within my organization, turned it into a very stovepiped process where it wound up being up to 20 people who would review a document just to catch things for the main purpose of avoiding a protest.”
More Army regulatory changes to come
Army officials say the operational planning team that looked at areas of Army policy that could be eliminated or streamlined didn’t just focus on peer reviews, and that other changes will be rolling out to the contracting workforce soon on a rolling basis.
“There is a FAR rewrite going on, and I don’t know what the end state is going to be yet, but hopefully it gets a little thinner,” said Maj. Gen. Douglas Lowrey, the commanding general of Army Contracting Command. “But the approach to the AFARS rewrite has been not, ‘Tell us what needs to change.’ It’s the flip of that: You have to justify why that’s in there, which I think is a good cultural mindset. Hopefully that’s happening at the DFARS and the FAR level as well.”
But Lowrey also argues there’s only so much that can be done within the contracting process to speed up the overall acquisition bureaucracy. He said the bigger challenge — and the more time-consuming one — is the way all the military services currently define their requirements.
“The way that technology is infusing our systems now, it’s no longer just a tank that shoots. It’s almost a living, breathing organism in and of itself. If we try to get the perfect requirement, we’re going to be late to the game,” he said. “If we try to go through this perfect process, we’re going to be late to the game. So I actually think it’s a huge opportunity for us to field stuff faster and get better equipment into the hands of the soldiers. We can commercialize a lot of things. Let’s take it off the line. It’s already been tested by Ford, Chevy, Caterpillar or whatever, right? We don’t need a dozer that has all these mil specs. Let’s just go to Caterpillar and use it. When it breaks, they’ve got the repair parts. We don’t need all this long tail.”
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