workforce from exercising the full discretion that they have?” In many cases, there’s some administrative utility to having some content in these supplements; but overall, there’s a movement to reduce. It’s all going in one direc- tion. Right now, we’re in a deregulatory mode, and that does include the supplements that the Services have put in place. Q From a technical aspect, what do you consider the most significant changes to come? How much of the future contracting process can be facilitated by artificial intelligence [AI]? A. There is certainly significant opportunity to exploit AI in our procurement processes, not only from an efficiency standpoint but also to enable more creative solutions. One side of AI application is within our own business processes. And an example of that, one of the early forms of AI as I suppose you could say, is how we go about selecting the provisions and clauses that we use in our contracts. We have long used what we call a clause logic service that, through prompts like you have with the AI tools, helps our contracting officers more efficiently decide which clauses are most appropriate for their contracts. As you know, within the department we have a wide range of different contracts, whether for major weapon systems, research and development, construction, and services, and a lot of other domains for which we have re- quirements. As a result, we need different contract clauses. So, in partnership with the DLA [Defense Logistics Agency] Information Operations program office, we’re developing what I would call smarter, logical prompts that will help us more efficiently and expeditiously select those clauses— that’s just one example of how AI will improve the efficiency of our procurement process. We are engaged with CDAO
[Chief Digital and AI Office] and others to champion other use cases for our workforce. The other aspect of AI involves how we go about con- tracting with industry for solutions that are AI-informed. That’s a developing policy area that we’re working on with our stakeholders in CDAO and OMB [Office of Management and Budget]. Our aim is to make sure—as we articulate what requirements can be fulfilled through AI solutions— that we understand where those solutions are coming from, so we have our eyes wide open in terms of how our capabilities are being met. Q How are you tackling this monumental project to overhaul the entire FAR and DFARS at once? A. This is a two-phase process. We have issued the model deviation text for the FAR and the DFARS. That has been a unilateral change to the entire regulation set, both the FAR and the DFARS. The first phase has been all unilateral, and the content of those changes has been all about reducing the content of the FAR and the DFARS—rolling back to what the statute requires and our team’s version of what the new FAR and the DFARS should look like. The most important opportunity we have entering phase two is putting out those same parts of the FAR and the DFARS for public notice and comment. In the coming weeks you will start seeing proposed rules published in the Federal Register through the normal rulemaking pro- cess of notice and comment. We need our workforce and industry engaged in phase two and seek their responses to the proposed rules. Our initial pass was to scale it back as best we could. Generally, there’s never any argument from industry when we’re going to take away compliance requirements, and so we were able to unilaterally remove some things. For example, the criticism we often get with FAR part 12 for commercial item contracting is that, over the years, we have imposed too many additional clauses and burdens on industry. We took this opportunity in the first phase to revisit which clauses we really need to put into FAR part 12 contracts. That’s probably the most noteworthy change that we made in phase one, but there are many more sub- stantive changes that we’re looking to advance in phase two that are all deregulatory. For example, we’re revisiting past performance collection and use. That area is ripe with opportunity, given modern business transactions consid- erations about how to enter the next deal with a firm or make a purchase. In most cases, we’re looking at streamlining and sim- plifying to the extent we can. To implement the executive order on “Restoring Common Sense to Federal Procure- ment,” we’re transforming the system to enable the out- comes we need without imposing all the administrative burden that has been tacked on over the years. But the most significant question for the DoW is, how can we navi - gate the procurement process more efficiently to enable more timely delivery of capability to the Warfighters? En - abling speed is one of the foremost criteria that we’re ap- plying to any of these changes.
8 DEFENSE ACQUISITION MAGAZINE | MARCH – APRIL 2026
Made with FlippingBook - Online Brochure Maker