Why Ken Calvert deserves support for cutting the Pentagon’s civilian workforce

At a recent hearing of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Cyber, Innovative Technologies and Information Systems, subcommittee chairman Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) lamented that, despite manifold units of the Department of Defense (DOD) being devoted to rapid innovation, little progress has been made to speed up the acquisition process or to enable start-up companies to transition to full-scale production.

Gallagher, who also chairs the House Select Committee on China, is especially sensitive to DOD’s failure to put the products of disruptive technologies rapidly into the hands of warfighters so as to maintain America’s shrinking advantage over the military forces of an increasingly belligerent Beijing.

Gallagher pointed out that the issue was neither one of authorities or structure, since DOD has more than enough of both. For instance, the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), with offices at key high-tech locations in Silicon Valley, Boston, Austin and Chicago, as well as in the Pentagon, is charged with enabling the military to make faster use of emerging commercial technologies. The Defense Innovation Board (DIB), whose members are drawn from Silicon Valley and its counterparts elsewhere across the country, is meant to propose new ways of exploiting innovative technologies. The Office of Strategic Capital (OSC) is meant to connect start-ups with private investors. In addition, there is an entire rapid-acquisition process that is meant to circumvent the standard acquisition system.

None of these efforts seem to have achieved their purpose, however, except to a most limited degree. Even when a company somehow breaks through what Gallagher has rightly termed the “slow, bureaucratic status quo,” it is only because the agency in question has special dispensation to avoid the usual rigmarole of the acquisition system.

Thus, for example, Anduril Industries, a relatively new start-up, won a major contract to produce systems to counter unmanned attack vehicles — but its primary customer was the Special Operations Command, whose acquisition system operates independently and has a separate funding account. The Space Development Agency (SDA), which transferred to the Space Force after its creation in 2019, has less budgetary freedom than the Special Operations Command, but as part of the Space Force it benefits from the Space Force’s budget flexibility and can facilitate rapid acquisition and system-fielding.

Nevertheless, the combined acquisition budgets of both the Special Operations Command and SDA represent but a small fraction of DOD’s overall acquisition budget. The problem, as Gallagher notes, is the Defense Department’s oversized, underperforming acquisition bureaucracy.

The DOD’s recent announcement that it plans to revive the Rapid Innovation Fund highlights the department’s bureaucratic troubles. The fund, which Congress created in fiscal 2011, predated the DIU, the DIB and the SDA by a good number of years. Yet it had a similar goal, namely, to enable small companies to transition disruptive technologies into full-scale production.

For reasons that are not at all clear, the fund was never included in the president’s budget request; it was always Congress that provided monies for it to operate, and it was not funded at all after fiscal 2019. The fund has now been transferred to the Office of Small Business Programs and, reportedly for the first time, will actually be included in the president’s budget.

How much money DOD actually will allocate to the fund, and how successfully the fund’s managers will overcome bureaucratic inertia, remain to be seen.

There is nothing new about critiques of the Pentagon bureaucracy. Yet the DOD civilian workforce continues to grow, even as the number of new weapons and systems that the department fields continues to shrink. Efforts to reform or reduce the bureaucracy consistently have failed. When Congress legislated cuts to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the department simply created a new office in October 1977 called Washington Headquarters Services and filled it with almost all the personnel who had been targeted for termination. Even when Bush-era Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sought to implement a new pay-for-performance system for civil servants, his efforts ultimately were blocked by the civil service unions.

In 2021, Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.), then the ranking member of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, introduced legislation that called for DOD to cut its civilian workforce by 15 percent —roughly 100,000 jobs — by 2025. Not surprisingly, the civil service unions bitterly opposed his initiative. With Republicans now in charge of the House, however, Calvert has assumed the chairmanship of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. In his new role he is better positioned to press for workforce reductions.

Should Calvert’s efforts succeed, the Defense Department’s acquisition workforce will likely shrink, thereby increasing the prospects of accelerating the introduction at scale of innovative programs developed in the commercial sector. First, however, Calvert must convince his colleagues in the House and his counterparts in the Senate to support his initiative. Moreover, he no doubt will again confront an entrenched civil service union ready to fight any effort that might affect its members.

Clearly, it will not be an easy matter for Calvert to overcome the challenges emanating from both on and off Capitol Hill. Nevertheless, the growing Chinese threat that worries Rep. Mike Gallagher, and so many others, surely renders Calvert’s efforts both urgent and imperative.

Dov S. Zakheim is a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and vice chairman of the board for the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He was undersecretary of Defense (comptroller) and chief financial officer for the Department of Defense from 2001 to 2004 and a deputy undersecretary of Defense from 1985 to 1987.