Mike Levin: “next week Dr. Paul Kaminski will step down after an extraordinary 3-year tenure as Under Secretary of Defense for…”

“next week Dr. Paul Kaminski will step down after an extraordinary 3-year tenure as Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition. In this short period of time, Dr. Kaminski and his acquisition team at the Pentagon have made dramatic steps to turn our procurement culture around, making it more flexible, more creative, and smarter. Under Dr. Kaminski's leadership, the Department of Defense has successfully implemented three major pieces of acquisition reform legislation: Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act, the Federal Acquisition Reform Act, and the Information Technology Management Reform Act. Those of us who worked hard to enact this legislation appreciate the energy that Dr. Kaminski and others have dedicated to putting it into practice. But the turnaround in the procurement culture has required far more than the implementation of new laws. Dr. Kaminski and his team have placed the Department of Defense at the forefront of acquisition reform by doing the hard work to revise and simplify thousands of military specifications, to implement streamlined management practices through integrated process teams and the single process initiative, and to make acquisition reform work where the rubber meets the road in tens of thousands of individual contracts awarded every year.”