* Chairman of the US House Budget Committee Paul Ryan submitted a new decade-long budget outline [PDF] that includes lower levels of defense spending than the one he issued last year, or the plan he supported as a vice presidential candidate. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said [PDF] it needed more time to process and assess such long-term budget projections because of recent tax code changes. The House’s baseline number for DoD in FY14, which this year oddly comes before the presidential request, comes at $560.2B.
* Yesterday the US Senate did not (yet) agree to start considering how to fund the federal government for the rest of FY13. Some prominent Republican senators wanted more time to read the 587-page bill (more than twice the size of HR 933, the house bill it is derived from). The subject will be on the floor again today. In the meantime, here is the CBO’s estimate [PDF] of the Senate’s version of the bill [PDF]. Sorting the current fiscal year’s finances before April 8, when the Administration will submit its FY14 request, would be a good idea.
* Daniel Gordon, a former lawyer for the Government Accountability Office (GAO), has researched the outcome of award protests filed with the GAO. He found that such protests rarely lead to decision reversals, but their cost can be seen as inconsequential to losers of the largest contracts, contributing to an inflation in protests. GovExec | Bloomberg Government.
* Lockheed Martin and Raytheon have joined an information sharing program managed by Homeland Security to share cyber threat signatures, according to Bloomberg. Meanwhile the Pentagon’s Cyber Command is to create a bunch of offensive cyber teams in years to come. And Israel would like to have more homegrown IT gear to help contain cyber threats.
* Lt Gen Christopher Bogdan, the recently-appointed PEO of the JSF program told reporters: “I plan on leaning out my program office at the same rate that I want to see Lockheed Martin and Pratt & Whitney lean out their program offices.” Speaking of JSF, the latest GAO report on the aircraft has been added to our source document repository.
* The Pentagon’s Acquisition Resources and Analysis (ARA) office and the Defense Acquisition University recently surveyed [PDF] program office personnel involved in major acquisition programs to ask them what factors led to obligations and expenditures missing their rate goals. A shortage of contracting officers came out on top of the high impact/high frequency quadrant, though responses were markedly scattered depending on where respondents worked (i.e. PEO vs. program office vs. OSD senior staff).
* Since Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) released its first draft RFP for the next presidential helicopter (VXX) in November 2012, they have made a number of changes, which is the drafting process working as intended. Yesterday they released a summary [PDF] of these changes, a very welcome practice as it is easy for program offices and contracting teams to get buried under a mountain of documents and lose track of changes in the making. This should be SOP.
