NDAA on track for mid-December: Rep. Wittman

WASHINGTON — The House and Senate are very close to a compromise deal on the fiscal 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), with the policy bill on track for a floor vote in the next few weeks, Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., said today.

“The NDAA is making great progress. I think we are just about finished with all the issues involving HASC [the House Armed Services Committee] and SASC [Senate Armed Services Committee]. The other issues remaining to be resolved are issues having to do with other committee jurisdictions, and those mostly are relegated to the Senate, so they’re trying to work through those particular issues.” he told the State of Defense Business Acquisition Summit sponsored by Defense One.

“I think that those will hopefully be done by the end of the week, and then the bill will be in its final form. It should be on the floor at the beginning of the second week of December,” predicted Wittman, who is a HASC member.

One of the things that the NDAA is focused on, he explained, is defense acquisition reform — an issue that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has now put at the top of his agenda.

“I think there’s some pretty important parts of what’s in this bill. We’ve done some things to really open the aperture for private equity investments through the Office of Strategic Capital to leverage more private dollars into the defense … R&D [research and development] stream,” Wittman said. “I think that’s going to be key.”

Another important change included in the bill would implement the Pentagon’s proposal to consolidate the current system of program-specific acquisition executives into fewer Portfolio Acquisition Executives (PAE) accountable for many interrelated programs, with the ability to shift cash among weapon systems based on performance or schedule considerations, he said. 

This includes extending the posting period for the PAEs from the traditional three years to six years, which will provide “more certainty” and allow those officials to be more “willing to take some risks,” Wittman said.

He cautioned, however, that in order to foster a more risk-tolerant defense acquisition culture at the Pentagon, Congress has to also change how it oversees program management.

“It has to start in Congress. I mean, we can’t lecture and say, ‘take risk,’ and then the first time there’s a failure, we call somebody up on Capitol Hill and bang the table and holler and scream and go, ‘how did you do this? How could this happen’?” Wittman said. “Because guess what? That behavior will stop at a heartbeat when somebody goes, ‘you know what? I watched them drill this PAE up on Capitol Hill. I’m not going to do that, so I’m not going to take any risks.'”