Disparate Pentagon business services will come under a centralized management system by the end of November. According to Government Executive magazine, acting Deputy Secretary Gordon England sent a memo to the services and defense agencies recently outlining the new one-stop shop—the Business Transformation Agency—that will comprise personnel and resources for the Defense Travel System, the Pentagon’s e-mail system, the Acquisition Spend Analysis Service, and the Defense Acquisition Management Information Retrieval program. It will be headed by either a senior executive service civilian or a two-star general.
A new report from the Government Accountability Office calls for the Pentagon’s Chief Technology Officer to have budget certification authority over the military services’ research and development accounts—a move the services say would add a burdensome and unnecessary layer of bureaucracy.
