Thank you for yielding me time, Mr. Chairman.

I appreciate the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations holding this important hearing on acquisition reform.  When I was Chairman of this Subcommittee, we reviewed a number of issues relating to acquisition at the Department of Veterans Affairs, including the VA’s own Task Force on Acquisition Reform.  What came out of the hearings we held and the investigations conducted by the VA’s own Inspector General’s office, the General Accounting Office and VA’s Procurement Reform Task Force ordered by Secretary Principe in 2001, was the strong sense that acquisition procedures at the VA were broken, fragmented and disorganized.

Ranking Member Roe in his opening statement alluded to the hearing you held last Congress on July 31, 2008, on Miscellaneous Obligations.  That hearing only served to further emphasize the fact that without proper oversight, funds that could be used to better serve our nation’s veterans were being wasted on broken procurement practices with little or no oversight review.  The frustration of all the members on both sides of the aisle at that hearing was loud and clear, and it was obvious that action was needed then to address the problems of acquisition at the VA.

To its credit, VA commissioned an $800,000 plus Price Waterhouse Cooper study to see how dysfunctional and broken the acquisition process was at the VA.  This study offered three options.  The VA selected the option that would create the least push back from the bureaucracy, and sent to last Congress a legislative proposal that would create an Assistant Secretary of Acquisition, but it did not provide any further direction or solution to respond to the universal complaint throughout the VA that glaciers move faster than its contracting process. 

So, I started working on legislation to change the way VA conducts its acquisition business.  My staff and I spoke with industry experts, GAO and VA IG to formulate a way to fix broken acquisition services at the VA in order to create better accountability.  I also discussed this issue with Secretary Shinseki who acknowledged that it was imperative for VA to change its procurement system to expedite the many transformational ways VA does business, and I shared a draft of the bill with him. 

Last week, I was joined by several other members of this Committee in the introduction of H.R. 4221, the Department of Veterans Affairs Acquisition Improvement Act of 2009.  Like the Administration drafted bill introduced last Congress by Senator Akaka, this new bill creates a new Assistant Secretary position, the Assistant Secretary for Acquisition, Construction and Asset Management, who will serve as the Chief Acquisition Officer for the Department of Veterans Affairs.  Our bill also builds the Acquisition workforce structure through the use of Deputy Assistant Secretaries aligned to VA’s business lines, and a Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary.

The bill further requires the Secretary to establish and maintain a comprehensive Department-wide acquisition program under which the Secretary will develop, implement, and enforce a streamlined approach to entering into contracts and purchasing goods and services.  The legislation would thereby provide better oversight and accountability for procurement at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

One of the key points that came out of the Industry Acquisition Roundtable I held on October 27th was the strong need for a well-trained acquisition workforce.  This legislation would provide the direction needed to put in place and keep a workforce that is knowledgeable and able to provide acquisition and contracting services to the Department.  The bill also reorganizes VA’s disparate and dysfunctional procurement, construction and asset management processes into distinct entities with contracting expertise.

Mr. Chairman, H.R. 4221 is a first step to provide a centralized oversight and policy for contracting and acquisition within the Department by streamlining the business operations under an Assistant Secretary.  It is my hope that we can work together to improve this bill, and create an acquisition model that can eventually be followed by other agencies, because VA’s acquisition problems are in fact government wide.