Implementing Management For Performance And Related Reforms To Obtain Value In Every Acquisition Act Of 2010
Floor Speech
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r. QUIGLEY. Mr. Chairman, I rise today in strong support of H.R. 5013, and I want to commend Mr. Andrews and all of his colleagues who have worked so diligently on this important piece of legislation.
I have offered an amendment, along with Congresswoman Giffords and Congressman Bartlett, which seeks to make the Department of Defense more energy efficient. This goal is absolutely essential to improving defense acquisition.
The Department of Defense accounts for 80 percent of the U.S. Government's energy consumption, including 330,000 barrels of oil each day. Just petroleum products cost the DOD $13 billion per year. Passing my amendment will save money and will conserve energy by including energy efficiency as a metric in performance assessment of defense acquisitions. It will also make weapon systems more energy efficient, which is a critical reform that can save lives.
In Afghanistan, consider that the Marines alone consume 800,000 gallons of fuel each day. These 800,000 gallons of fuel must cross from Pakistan into Afghanistan through a lawless border region. During this 400-mile trip from Karachi, convoys are extremely vulnerable to IEDs, but energy-efficient weapons systems reduces fuel use, which reduces the number of convoys, which reduces the number of troops in harm's way.
I urge you to support my amendment and to support energy efficiency in the defense acquisition process, and I yield back the balance of my time.
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Mr. QUIGLEY. Mr. Chairman, this amendment directs the Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation, or CAPE, in its next report to Congress to do two things:
First, the amendment asks the CAPE to assess whether and to what extent program cost estimators for major defense acquisition programs are, indeed, independent.
Second, the amendment asks the CAPE to determine whether a lack of independence affects their ability to generate reliable cost estimates.
For 30 years now, DOD officials, analysts, and industry experts have argued that a primary cause of the cost growth in DOD acquisitions is unrealistically low cost estimates. Many of these unrealistic cost estimates are generated by individuals, such as program representatives, who have a stake in the approval of their systems. The newly created CAPE is designed to generate reliable cost estimates, but cost estimates are still generated by contractors and program representatives whose independence is paramount to creating reliable estimates. This amendment seeks to address this problem.
I urge my colleagues to support this commonsense amendment, and I reserve the balance of my time.
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