00:00Thank you for that. I now recognize the gentleman from Massachusetts, Mr. Lynch, for five minutes.
00:08Thank you. First of all, thank you to all the witnesses for your willingness to come forward and help the committee with its work.
00:15Mr. Schwartz, we just had, so since January of this year, when the Trump administration took over, we've had about 121,000 layoffs at DOD.
00:27Do we know how many of those employees came out of the Defense Acquisition Department?
00:35I don't know. Estimates I've heard of ultimate goals is something like 10,000, but that's only what I have heard.
00:42Yeah. The deferred resignation program that was offered to DOD took out 21,000 of our employees who, to be eligible, you had to be 50 years old and you had to have 20 years of service.
01:00If you had 25 years of service, there was no age limit there, obviously.
01:08But that cohort, you know, first of all, 83% of these people have a bachelor's degree or greater.
01:18I'm just trying to figure what the impact of the layoffs and the so-called deferred resignation program had on the efficiency and the capabilities of the Defense Acquisition Program in general.
01:37Sure. So two comments. One is you mentioned 20 years and over 50, and I just realized how old I am because I fit into that.
01:45Yeah, but that would be some of our most valuable and knowledgeable and capable employees, right?
01:53So there are a lot of people that are very capable, absolutely.
01:56And I can't control what the size ultimately will be, but I do believe we absolutely can take steps now to ensure that we have the right workforce,
02:05and importantly, not just numbers, but the right skills and the right incentives for the people in two years, three years, four years, because this is a long-term game.
02:13Yeah. Do you have any, going back to the gentleman's earlier question, do you have any idea how many PLAs are actually in place?
02:24No. Anybody there? Yeah.
02:26My experience, and I'm a former union president for the iron workers, and one of the complaints I have just generally with DOD contracts is it's a black box.
02:38Nobody knows how these contracts are being awarded.
02:42It seems like there's a propensity to award contracts to firms that have connections with former admirals or generals,
02:52and so they have an inside knowledge of the needs of DOD.
02:57They've got those relationships, and that's much more prevalent.
03:02That's involved in every single DOD contract, and there are very, very few product development programs or any contracts at DOD in acquisitions that have a PLA.
03:23They might do it to build a warehouse or something like that, but there's very few of those.
03:31I don't know of any that are in place right now in the entire United States, but those programs, a PLA would require that those individuals working on that program go through an apprenticeship program that they're highly skilled.
03:50You know, I think electricians, it's a five-year apprenticeship program for plumbers, pipe fitters, steam fitters, five-year program.
04:00So they make sure that these folks that are going on to DOD projects are actually highly skilled and able to perform the work at a level that meets the standard of the Defense Department.
04:18What do you think would be the most impactful change that we could make in this whole acquisition process in order to generate some of the savings that are there potentially that exist right now?
04:39I know we're talking huge numbers, but are there one or two things?
04:44I'm not asking for a silver bullet, but the most important changes that we can make to actually glean those savings that we desperately need?
04:56Yes.
04:57Invest in IT systems.
04:58And I'll just give two examples.
04:59And I think we talked about this last time.
05:03DOD does not have a world-class defense travel system, right?
05:07There's the defense travel system.
05:08You could actually go onto YouTube and you will hear rants by uniformed personnel about their travel system.
05:12You could actually see it.
05:14It's interesting.
05:15So DOD tried to put in a new system because DTS had about a billion dollars of improper payments.
05:21Well, we don't know what happened.
05:23So they had a system, they did a successful other transaction and a successful prototype, and they could not implement it.
05:30A commercial system that is used ubiquitously around the world by Fortune 500 companies, they could not implement it.
05:36It wasn't a problem with the system.
05:37It was a problem with DOD.
05:39That cost money.
05:40We can save money on travel.
05:42We can save money on logistics.
05:44We can save money on maintenance.
05:45We're buying more planes because we have readiness rates which are so low we don't have enough to fight with.
05:51We could save a lot of money.
05:53It's like investing in college if we did the IT systems right.
