Lawmakers to finalize NDAA by week’s end, bring the bill to the floor in early December
House and Senate negotiators are racing to finalize the 2026 defense policy bill by the end of the week, with all House and Senate Armed Services Committee disputes resolved and only a few Senate jurisdictional details still holding the legislation’s advancement to the House floor in early December.
“I think what they’re doing is, there’s been a couple of pencils-down time frames, but it sounds like it’ll be done by the end of the week. That’s what the focus is. Get it done by the end of the week, and then to be on the floor the beginning of the second week of December,” Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., a member of the House Armed Services Committee, told Federal News Network Tuesday.
The one big place where things are still going through the process, Wittman said, is with the other committees of jurisdiction. They can either decide to waive jurisdiction or refine the language in ways that ensure the “Big Four” on HASC and SASC will agree to include it in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
“It really is a Senate issue because the Senate has the rules where they can add some things that are not allowed under House rules. That’s really where the issue is right now, I think all the HASC and SASC issues have been taken care of,” Wittman said.
The Senate advanced its NDAA with broad bipartisan support in October, while the House version passed in September with mostly GOP support.
The two chambers were divided on topline funding — the Senate bill authorized nearly $ 925 billion for national defense, while the House version aligned with the White House’s $ 883 billion request.
Both bills are heavily focused on acquisition reforms, and while the two chambers target many of the same areas, they differ in approach and specific reforms.
“The House’s version really focused on achieving mission outcomes. It’s much more outcome-based. The Senate version was more about governance. How do we change the issues there of governance? Some of the things that we saw there that I think are really transformational is time frames,” Wittman said during the Defense One State of Defense Business Acquisition event on Tuesday. “The average acquisition process in the Pentagon is 800 days. This is going to change it to 90 to 120 days.”
Many of the acquisition reforms Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently rolled out as part of what he called a “war on Pentagon bureaucracy” mirror proposals in the House and Senate versions of the defense policy bill.
“Changing how we do modular open systems architecture — those things are going to be key, opening up the aperture even more, making it easier to use other transaction authorities, changing the [program executive officers] to [program acquisition executives], and then taking those billets that are now three-year billets and turning them into six-year billets,” Wittman said. “That’s actually a longer-term perspective for folks in those areas. I think this is the farthest-reaching effort in acquisition reform in the history of DoD. And a lot of what the House and Senate are doing is reflected in some of the things that the Pentagon is doing.”
Hegseth’s move to replace the current program executive offices with a smaller number of portfolio acquisition executives — giving these new portfolio leaders broader authorities, including the ability to shift funds among programs — is also part of the Senate’s acquisition reform proposals.
When asked whether officers who used to serve three years as PEOs would want to serve six-year tours as PAEs, Wittman wagered they would as long as it doesn’t interfere with the promotion process.
“We’ve been clear that this does not interfere with the promotion process,” he said. “There’s nothing that prevents somebody that goes into a PAE position as a two-star to come out as a three-star, or, for that matter, even a four-star.”
The change will also allow PAEs to take more risks in a culture that is deeply risk-averse. But it has to start with Congress, Whittman said.
“We can’t lecture and say, ‘Take risks,’ 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?’ That behavior will stop in a heartbeat when somebody goes, ‘You know what? I watched them grill this PAE up on Capitol Hill. I’m not going to do that, so I’m not going to take any risks,’” Whittman said.
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