WASHINGTON — Mike Brown, the former director of the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) who left his role earlier this month, has been formally cleared of engaging in “improper personnel practices” while serving in his position, according to a decision from the Department of Defense Inspector General (DoD IG).
“We did not substantiate the allegations,” DoD Deputy IG for Administrative Investigations Marguerite Garrison wrote in a Sept. 9 letter. “We reviewed relevant documents and conducted interviews with persons knowledgeable of the events at issue. We concluded that you did not engage in improper personnel practices.”
The decision comes more than a year after Brown withdrew his nomination for DoD’s top acquisition role after the IG launched its investigation; while Brown maintained his confidence the IG would clear him, he withdrew his nomination due to the length of time the report would take to be completed. The complaint itself stemmed from a former DIU official, who claimed Brown improperly hired individuals and the innovation hub altered contracts to award bonus funds to specific employees.
Brown, who led DIU for four years, opened up about a lack of support from Pentagon leadership and what he called a “benign neglect” from top officials surrounding DIU’s budget in an outgoing interview with Breaking Defense.
“I just don’t feel that we’re making the kind of progress that I’d like to see made,” Brown said in the May 10 interview. “So I’m frustrated that we’re not achieving more, we’re not supported more. There’s not the agreement by leadership that this is a priority. And so if that is the case, then you can’t accomplish what you believe should be accomplished. It’s really that simple.”
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In an Aug. 29 op-ed for Breaking Defense, Bill Greenwalt of the American Enterprise Institute wrote that “the exasperated throwing in of the towel by Brown should be a wakeup call after his years of frustration dealing with a system that is just not conducive to change.”
Speaking on Tuesday at a Hudson Institute event, Brown spoke about the “culture clash” in DoD when it comes to commercial technology adoption and emphasized the need to have multiple ways of buying that will allow DoD to move at different speeds because “one size does not fit all for what the military needs.”
“But the culture clash that occurs is, the military is used to buying very large hardware platforms and keeping them around for a long time,” he said. “That’s very different than how we think about an iPhone or something else we’re buying in the consumer world, where we’re going to replace that quickly and it’s a very low price point compared to a large weapons platform.
“So I think what I would observe from my time at DIU and DoD is that we just don’t have enough variation or ability to adapt our processes to buy the things that the commercial world is producing, meaning things that don’t have a large sustainment strategy…things at lower price points, things that need to be refreshed faster,” he continued. “So in fact, we’ve advocated at DIU that we have a complementary way of buying things that doesn’t rely on the same things that we would use in buying an aircraft carrier.”