The Long Road to Acquisition Reform

In 1994 then Sen. William Cohen released a report titled "Computer Chaos: Billions Wasted Buying Federal Computer Systems." The report resonates even today with the release this month of a Defense Science Board report calling for the Defense Department to reform its information technology acquisition practices.

In 1994, Cohen wrote that the entire federal government spent about $25 billion a year on computer systems and related equipment and "weak oversight and a lengthy acquisition process have not led to American taxpayers not getting their money's worth of $200 billion in expenditures in the past decade."

That report eventually led to the passage of the ()

1996 Information Technology Management Reform Act, later renamed the Clinger-Cohen Act, which intended to improve the way the federal government acquires and uses information technology systems, whose price tag has more than doubled in the 15 years since Cohen wrote his report.

In 2008, Defense alone had an IT budget of $32.2 billion out of an overall federal IT budget of $63.4 billion, and Defense still takes a real long to acquire IT systems, according to the science board report. That report called for a new streamlined incremental IT acquisition process designed to field portions of a system in just 18 months - which is about the life cycle of reports calling for acquisition reform.

Think I'm kidding? Check out this nifty online archive from Business Executives for National Security, which runs six pages and lists Defense acquisition reports and studies dating all the way back to 1977.

Nothing much seemed to be reformed in Defense acquisitions, but it sure keeps a lot of report writers (and reporters) awfully busy.