The Crumblestones Of Acquisition: Governance Constraints (Part 4)

What’s Really Holding You Back Is More Than the FAR

Serialized from Contracting for Rapid Acquisition: A Practical and Personal Guide to Disrupting the Status Quo for a More Responsive Future
By Lorna E. Tedder

Governance is supposed to help us. In theory, it provides structure, accountability, and alignment with law and mission. It’s supposed to protect us from fraud, waste, and abuse. It’s supposed to ensure fairness, transparency, and integrity. All good things.

But in practice? Governance—at least the way we often implement it—can become a Crumblestone, one of the hidden stress points that undermines our ability to move fast, make smart decisions, and deliver results.

When I walk into an acquisition shop where nothing is moving, one of the first things I look for is the governance model. Not just the regulations or statutes, either. Who gets to say yes? Who has the authority to approve what? How many layers of review are required—and are they adding value, or just adding delay? How much unnecessary extra oversight has been added, even to the point of contradicting new policies to speed up the processes?

Governance, Defined

In the Federal acquisition world, governance refers to the framework of roles, policies, decision-making authorities, and oversight structures that guide how we buy things—legally, ethically, and strategically. It includes:

• Policy frameworks (such as the Federal Acquisition Regulation [FAR], Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement [DFARS], and Executive Orders. Yes, I’m including regulations in this section because they can be the foundation for policies.)
• Decision authorities (who signs what and at what threshold)
• Oversight structures (Acquisition Review Boards [ARBs], Milestone Decision Authorities [MDAs], peer reviews)
• Accountability mechanisms (audits, metrics, Inspector General [IG] reviews, internal controls)
• Strategic alignment (mission support, policy objectives, budget constraints)

All of that matters. But governance goes sideways when we confuse structure with strangulation.

The Myth of the FAR as the Villain

If I had a dollar for every time I heard “We can’t do that—the FAR won’t let us,” I’d be funding my own Other Transaction Authority. The truth? The FAR gives you more flexibility than you think. What ties people up isn’t always policy—it’s the interpretation of policy as well as the fear of more lenient policies. Yes, you read that right. Worse: it’s the local layer cake of added rules, checklists, and reviews that have nothing to do with law and everything to do with habit—or fear.

Some of this overlaps with the Communication Crumblestone, but more often with the Culture Crumblestone.

One of the biggest trends I’ve seen, starting around 2020, is “FAR-ifying” Other Transactions (OTs). I’ve watched innovative tools—OTs and Middle Tier Acquisition (MTA) efforts, for example—get buried under the same templates and source selection criteria we use for the most rigid FAR Part 15 buys and oversight for weapons systems. Clauses get copied over wholesale, with only the header changed. Authorities designed for speed and simplicity become indistinguishable from their legacy counterparts. This is what people are comfortable with—it’s the devil they know.

The Middle Tier of Acquisition was specifically written as an Adaptive Acquisition Framework pathway that allowed for significantly less time-consuming documentation. What did we do? Very quickly added back in layers of oversight and documentation that had been removed, only to have it “tailored” back in. Even adding back the old, no-longer-required documentation in a slightly different format and calling it “abbreviated” or saying a review isn’t a “review” but a “vector check” quickly added back specifically what had been removed, just under a different name. I’ve seen programs that required only 30 documents or reviews insist on adding back their old documents and reviews in some format, insisting they were all “needed” in at least some form. Maybe they were, but they went from a required 30 to a maybe required but most likely not 300. And that adds time.

What’s the point of having these tools if we don’t use them as intended?

Why Reform Doesn’t Stick

As I write this, I am waiting to see the results of what is being called the “revolutionary” new FAR, and I’m truly hoping it’s more than just a buzzword. Will the word revolutionary become the next innovative? It’s not that I’m against FAR reform, but this isn’t the first time in my career that I’ve seen it attempted, and it won’t be the first time it goes sideways unless we learn from past mistakes. I watch patterns. I study cycles. This is why they say history repeats itself—it does, but with improved technology.

I’m earnestly hoping that the newest reform will have more foresight than I’ve seen in the last almost 40 years of squinting hard at similar initiatives. Do you know what goes wrong every single time? Why something impressively effective and efficient gets bastardized, and a few years later, we’re back to where we started?

We skinny down to the bare necessities and then quietly add it all back and more over a few years. Often when we streamline, we can justify reducing staff, but staff doesn’t get added back when the old processes return. We can depend on technology for assistance with extra work, but it’s often not enough, and now we’ve lost the human experts.

We fail to do our homework about what went wrong last time and then fail to be as fast or as effective as promised; we have a harder time finding a real solution. I’ve heard calls for sweeping generational change—pushing aside experienced voices in favor of fresh perspectives without fully understanding what went wrong last time. I rarely see those conversations include what went wrong last time or ask why the original rules were put in place.

Yes, a lot of the time it’s because someone wanted more control over a situation and needed extra reports because more data makes them feel secure. Sometimes, there are other reasons you wouldn’t guess. There were times in my career when I followed a rule that seemed silly and didn’t know why I had to apply it other than that it was mandatory, only to be happy later to learn that I had recourse when my contractor didn’t use safety procedures with the explosives they had next door to a daycare center.

We need to understand the why to know if we should throw rules out completely. I’m often asked why we use a particular practice, and because I’m a human archive—or feel like it—I’m able to explain that when we fail to set boundaries around a practice, we often end up needing legal tools to fix a predictable mess. I know this because I’ve witnessed it, not because anyone wrote it into the rulebook.

We forget what legal or ethical looks like. I’ve seen all my “revolutionary” tools and techniques get misused, eventually, by someone looking for a shortcut to giving a contract to a friend, usually sole source. The tool itself was a legal, ethical shortcut that saved oodles of time, but when someone decided to shortcut their ethics, then the tool became associated with fraud or sloppiness.

Ethics still need to be modeled, in my opinion, for the next generations, and if all we ever see are conflicts of interest or failures to abide by fiscal law, then that becomes the norm.

If it sounds like I’m a FAR-lover, I’m not. If you think I’m advocating for not reforming the acquisition system, then you’ve misunderstood. What do I want now that I’m being promised all the reforms I’ve fought for over decades, only to win some and watch the excess creep back in and then streamline, and then watch the policy creep yet again?

What I really, really want is for the people writing the reforms to think beyond the immediate product. I want them to think about how it will play out over the next year, and the year after that. I want them to think ahead to what can and will go wrong and build it into the reforms now so it’s not another revolution that just gets papered over.

When old-timers ask, “Why is this time any different?” it’s not to say this time isn’t good but “How are you going to make sure this time doesn’t go wrong like all the previous times?” It’s a valid question, and I want to see how true change and improvement will be built in and—big acquisition word—sustained.The question isn’t merely whether the system can be reformed but whether reform can be, yes, sustained.

Bottom line? I want people who reform governance to think ahead just as I always did when crafting an acquisition strategy and trying to foresee what might go wrong three years after we were on contract that I would never be able to fix later or would be too costly to fix later.

When Good Policy Goes Bad

I’ve seen policy creators roll out guidance with a clear intent—only to see that intent warped beyond recognition once it hits the field. I recall this happening with one of the Better Buying Power slides where an example share ratio was given, and many people interpreted the slide as saying they had to use that specific share ratio. And poor you if the person interpreting it as the new one-size-fits-all share ratio was your organization’s Policy Chief or a decision authority!

By the time it’s been cleared, edited, and interpreted locally, the spirit of the policy is often gone, replaced by something unrecognizable. And nobody questions it because “that’s what the policy says now.”

I’ve been personally startled to hear my own policy text misinterpreted more than once. The last two times, I was asked how to use a tool or technique in a given situation. My written words were included verbatim in the official guidance. Everyone who knew the question being resolved thought the words were self-explanatory. However, I later had people in the trenches quote my words as saying the tool and technique weren’t allowed—in a completely different situation. All I could do was shake my head and ask, “Why would you ever think this guidance applies to your situation?” After all, I was so specific, but in the absence of the information they were looking for, information about a different situation was the closest they could find.

This is how we end up with review boards that spend more time on formatting than on strategy, or milestone decisions held up for months because of a single unclear sentence in a document that no one outside the review chain ever reads again.

Governance becomes a performance instead of a safeguard. It becomes something we perform for our bosses, our auditors, or our inspectors—not because it helps us make better decisions, but because it checks a box.

Audits as Signals, Not Snares

Let’s talk about audits. They serve a purpose, but they also shape behavior, sometimes in unintended ways.

Take a 2022 example I saw firsthand: a report from the Department of Defense Inspector General (DoDIG) on an Other Transaction that, on the surface, sounded like a disaster. The executive summary made it seem like the Agreements Officer (AO) had bungled the entire thing. But when I read the full report (and how many of us read full reports?), the actual finding was that the AO hadn’t done something that wasn’t required. Not that it was wrong, but that it didn’t looklike the FAR process the auditors were used to.

The Navy, bless them, defended the AO, and rightly so. But the chilling effect was real. Who’s going to volunteer to use an innovative tool after that?

I’ve seen audits, inspections, and review write-ups since my first day in acquisition. So many times, they’re meant as and taken as a “gotcha.” My ideal would be that they look for real problems as well as trends, and that information is shared with the workforce. Not a gotcha, but a way to figure out where more training is needed. I’ve always hated that they were used as a barbed wire-wrapped club instead of as a positive tool for improvement.

What Governance Should Be

Governance should enable strategy—not smother it. It should be:

• Clear enough to guide decisions,
• Flexible enough to adapt to different risks and missions, and
• Minimal enough that the burden doesn’t outweigh the benefit.

It should protect the mission, not protect people from taking responsibility.

One of my favorite sayings in Contracting is: “It depends.” Because it’s true. And because it reflects the idea that flexibility is possible—even essential.

What to Do When You’re Stuck

If your acquisition is stalled and governance is the culprit, ask yourself:

• What exactly is being reviewed—and by whom?
• Is this review required by statute or just by tradition?
• Does each step add value or just delay?
• Is the intent of the policy still visible in the process—or has it been buried?

Then ask your senior leaders:

• What are you willing to remove from the process?
• What reviews or signatures are based on fear, not necessity?
• Where can we build in trust instead of adding checks?

TL;DR – Don’t Blame [Just] the FAR

Most of what slows us down isn’t required. It’s inherited.

Governance matters, but only when it’s built for purpose, not for appearances. If your structure doesn’t allow you to move quickly or make decisions when it counts, governance has become a Crumblestone. And it’s time to rebuild.

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Next up: Faulty Requirements Handoffs—where good ideas go to die if you’re not careful.