Quigley Speaks on Two Amendments to Defense Acquisition Overhaul Bill

Today, Congressman Quigley delivered the following remarks on the House floor in support of two amendments he introduced to the Defence Acquisition Reform Bill:

Madam Speaker, I rise today in strong support of H.R. 5013, and I want to commend Mr. Andrews and all of his colleagues who worked so diligently on this important piece of legislation.

I've 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 central 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 DOD $13 billion per year.

Passing my amendment will save money and conserve energy by including energy efficiency as a metric in performance assessment of defense acquisitions.

It will also help make weapons systems more energy efficient, a critical reform that can save lives.

Consider that in Afghanistan, 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 can reduce 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 support energy efficiency in the defense acquisition process.

Madam Speaker, I rise today in strong support of H.R. 5013, and in support of Quigley amendment number 9.

This bill will go a long way in reforming our defense acquisition process, and my amendment simply seeks to enhance those efforts.

My amendment directs the Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation, or the 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 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, DOD officials, analysts and industry experts have argued that a primary cause of 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 system.

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 yield my time.