House appropriators call for new Space Force acquisition pilot

Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., arrives to a meeting of the House Republican Conference in the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, June 4, 2025. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — In their just-passed version of the fiscal 2026 defense budget, House appropriators instruct Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to create a Space Force pilot project that would organize acquisition programs and personnel by “mission areas.”

The call is the result of House Appropriations Committee (HAC) concern “that the Department of Defense continues to struggle with delivering critical capabilities on-time and on-budget,” according to the bill report language released on Tuesday. Schedule delays and cost overruns have been the bane of DoD space acquisition for decades.

The HAC, chaired by Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., finds that a key reason underlying the Pentagon’s acquisition woes is that the military services do not allow program officers responsible for acquisition oversight to remain in their posts long enough. Fixing this is especially important at a time when “program manager technical competency is more critical than ever as defense systems and weapons platforms are more technologically complex than ever, such as with space systems,” the report stresses.

The HAC report points out that “statutes have been in place for years requiring tenure of program managers, but sadly the Department routinely ignores the statute, favoring instead to rotate officers frequently in order to better position them for promotion. The Committee feels strongly that promotions should be based on merit and accomplishment, not based on getting the plum assignments to ‘punch the right tickets.'”

Thus, the appropriators “encourage” DoD to ensure that the new Space Force pilot allows program managers to remain in place for longer than current practice of about three years in order to allow them to build the technical and management skills required to adequately ensure program success.

“The intent of the pilot program is to implement mission area program offices with responsibility, authority and accountability for the entire life-cycle of a mission, from system concept, through acquisition, development, fielding, and operational life,” the HAC report explains.

The committee also urges the Space Force to consider reorganizing how Guardians are ranked and assigned jobs as part of the pilot.

The pilot “should examine combining the enlisted and officer ranks into a single system with fewer ranks, elimination of the current occupational specialty categories, such as acquirers or operations, in favor of specializations focused on mission areas, such as missile warning or satellite communications, with assignments focused on developing deep expertise in all aspects of a mission area,” the report said.

That provision echoes similar acquisition reforms laid out by the leaders of the House Armed Services Committee, Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Ala., and ranking member Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., in a wide-ranging draft bill called the SPEED Act released Tuesday. The proposed bill likewise compels the Pentagon to begin looking at how to organize program officers around “major capability activity areas,” rather than individual weapons programs.