Defense Acquisition Reform Takes Center Stage with SPEED and FoRGED Acts

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Evan Beebe
09/18/2025

Earlier this month, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the FY26 National Defense Authorization Act. The normally non-partisan legislation had a 231-196 vote that split mostly down party lines due to the addition of cultural amendments, including measures pertaining to transgender individuals.

Despite the vote being more contentious than in years past, the bill’s eventual passing could authorize $848 billion for defense purposes. The House version overwhelmingly rejected proposals to cut Ukraine and Taiwan funding, including keeping $400 million for Ukraine aid. With several impactful amendments included in this year’s NDAA, none might be more important for private industry than the SPEED Act, which opens the door to reform the DoD's notoriously cumbersome acquisition process.

This article will dive into the SPEED and FoRGED acts, the U.S. House and Senate's respective efforts to reform defense acquisition in this year's NDAA. We will look at each version of the acquisition reform bills and assess where they stand as the NDAA for FY 2026 reaches the reconciliation stage.

SPEED Act

The NDAA passed in the House draws heavily from the Streamlining Procurement For Effective Execution And Delivery (SPEED) Act, a bipartisan effort led by House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-AL) and Ranking Member Adam Smith (D-WA ).

A centerpiece of the reform is the overhaul of the Pentagon’s requirements process, which currently takes more than 800 days. Under the SPEED framework, that timeline would shrink to about five months by transforming the Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC) into a new Joint Requirements Council (JRC). The JRC would pivot away from rubber-stamping highly detailed capability documents and instead evaluate evolving threats, joint force needs, and long-term operational priorities. Its recommendations would then move to a new body called RAPID (Requirements, Acquisition, and Programming Integration Directorate), which would integrate input from the Joint Staff, CAPE, combatant commanders, and acquisition leaders. RAPID would have 60 days to assess cost and feasibility before passing recommendations to the deputy defense secretary, who must make a decision within 30 days.

To ensure technologies meet real-world mission needs, a parallel organization, the Mission Engineering and Integration Activity (MEIA), would serve as an experimentation hub. MEIA would stress-test technologies under operationally relevant conditions before acquisition decisions are finalized, creating a direct pipeline from requirements to fielded capabilities.

Beyond process restructuring, the bill emphasizes four reform pillars. Those include:

Aligning Acquisition to Warfighter Priorities and Operational Outcomes – Empowering program executive officers with greater authority over planning, budgets, and execution, while reorganizing program offices around major capability areas rather than individual weapons programs.
Striking the Balance Between Regulation and Efficiency – Reducing or eliminating cost and accounting requirements that add time and discourage commercial firms from entering the defense market.
Strengthening the Defense Industrial Base and Leveraging Commercial Innovation – Establishing a DoD Industrial Resilience Consortium to bring together manufacturers, technology developers, supply chain stakeholders, and research institutes to address issues like parts obsolescence and foreign material dependencies.
Developing a Mission-Oriented Defense Acquisition Workforce – Requesting reports on the state of the defense acquisition workforce to guide future congressional decisions on how best to train, equip, and structure it for modern challenges.

FoRGED Act

Before these acquisition reforms become a reality, the House’s NDAA will have to be reconciled with the Senate’s version of the bill, which authorizes a topline defense budget that is $32 billion larger than the House version. Additionally, the Senate will consider its own acquisition reform act in its version of the Defense Authorization Act.

The Senate’s version of acquisition reform is known as the FoRGED Act (Fostering Reform and Government Efficiency in Defense), and it represents a more sweeping overhaul of the defense acquisition system than the House’s SPEED Act. While the SPEED Act focuses on refining existing processes and streamlining red tape, the FoRGED Act aims to fundamentally reshape how the DoD does business. The following are the six areas the FoRGED Act intends to change about the acquisition processes.

Regulatory Cleanup - The FoRGED Act eliminates roughly 80 outdated laws and regulations. This “spring cleaning” is designed to simplify the acquisition framework and remove obsolete restrictions that slow down procurement.
Commercial-First Acquisition - The Act requires DoD to start with private-sector solutions before pursuing defense-unique development. It broadens the definition of nontraditional defense contractors, reduces entry barriers, and limits regulatory burdens, encouraging greater participation from commercial firms that historically avoided Pentagon contracts.
Portfolio Management Reform - Program Executive Officers (PEOs) are re-designated as Portfolio Acquisition Executives (PAEs) with expanded authority over requirements, resources, and acquisition strategies. Each service will set high-level “capstone requirements” for portfolios, ensuring agility and alignment across families of systems, instead of treating programs as isolated projects.
Acquisition Process Innovation - FoRGED introduces new tools to make acquisition faster and more industry-friendly. These include pay-as-you-go procurement models, expanded Commercial Solutions Openings (CSOs), faster approvals for Other Transaction Authority (OTA) agreements, and clearer limits on defense-specific rules for commercial buys. The Act also restricts flowdown requirements to subcontractors to ease compliance for smaller firms.
Operational Innovation and MOSA Mandate - Combatant commands are given direct authority to run prototyping, experimentation, and technology demonstrations, tying acquisition more closely to real-world needs. The Act also mandates the use of Modular Open Systems Architecture (MOSA) in major programs to increase flexibility, interoperability, and ease of upgrades.
Workforce Development Study - Rather than prescribing training requirements, FoRGED calls for an independent study of the defense acquisition workforce to assess skills, readiness, and training needs.

Since the House has already passed its NDAA with the SPEED Act, those provisions now serve as the baseline in negotiations with the Senate, which includes the broader FoRGED Act. The reconciliation process will happen in a conference committee, where lawmakers must merge the House’s and Senate’s targeted reforms. The final NDAA will likely be a hybrid, blending SPEED’s practical process improvements with FoRGED’s regulatory modernization.

Attempts to reform the defense acquisition process come at a time when the U.S. DoD has received $24.4 billion from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act for the development of hypersonic missile defense systems. To hear from defense leaders on how acquisition reform will impact missile defense programs such as the Golden Dome for America, register for IDGA’s Next Generation Missile Summit taking place December 9-10 in Reston, Virginia. The two-day summit will bring together senior leaders from the Department of Defense, industry, allied governments, and academia to drive mission-aligned innovation and operational readiness.