As the Defense Department moves to implement Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s sweeping acquisition reforms, Space Force leaders warn that the depth of workforce cuts is threatening to cripple the service’s ability to execute them.
“You have to have a strong, vibrant workforce to do the work and we’re in a really interesting time and a troubling time. There is a strong, motivated force but there have been an incredible amount of pressures on them this past year,” Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, acting assistant secretary for space acquisition and integration at the Department of the Air Force, said Nov. 20 during a Center for Strategic and International Studies event.
“We have a looming increase in acquisitions coming down the pike, and so that presents us with a really difficult situation of where we need to double down on our acquisition workforce, our acquisition training. We are in a situation where we barely have enough acquirers to do all of the work that we have now,” he added.
Purdy said the service has spent the last few years implementing the acquisition tenets set by Frank Calvelli, who stepped down as assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration in January. Calvelli pushed the service to “build smaller satellites and smaller ground systems and minimize non-recurring engineering or new design.” He also preferred to use fixed-price contracts when possible. Calvelli’s “tenets” were a back-to-basics formula meant to fix chronic problems in space programs.
]]>
“We’ve built upon that this last year. We haven’t let grass grow under our feet as we’ve kind of taken over in January. And we’ve built upon that foundation and moved on out and really done a lot this year that kind of foreshadowed [Hegseth’s] acquisition reforms. But the workforce question is really the key piece,” Purdy said.
The Trump administration push to reduce the size of the federal workforce through initiatives such as the deferred resignation program and voluntary early retirement has had an “outsized impact” on the Space Force. In May, Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman told Congress the service had lost nearly 14% of its civilian workforce — much of it coming from Space Systems Command, the Space Force’s acquisition hub.
“I’m worried about replacing that level of expertise in the near term as we try to resolve it and make sure we have a good workforce doing that acquisition,” Saltzman told the Senate Armed Services Committee at the time.
When asked about the acquisition workforce, Saltzman told reporters that these workforce reduction efforts have taken civilian experts “out of play,” leaving gaps in the institutional knowledge and technical skills.
As the Space Force begins implementing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s acquisition overhaul, which calls for using commercial technology as the default option, great competition and faster delivery, Purdy warned the service may not have the workforce needed to shift to the new way of doing business.
“If you look at [Hegseth’s] acquisition reforms that he’s laid out, a bunch of great initiatives and things we need to get after. But … you need the numbers of people, and you need the quality to understand. If you say ‘go commercial,’ and if you say, go after ‘new manufacturing mechanisms’ and take advantage of all of the new space companies that are out there, you need a larger number of people just to even track that activity. You need to be able to understand all that’s going on. You need to understand the incentive structure,” Purdy said.
The strain is particularly acute in contracting since the service simply doesn’t have enough contracting officers to handle a much larger workload created by recent acquisition reforms.
]]>
“In the past, if we had an acquisition program and we would go 20 years and it would be with one prime, we would maybe have one or two contracts, an R&D contract and a production contract. Pretty simple. One prime, a couple contracts. Now, with some of our programs there’ll be a five-year program, but we’ll probably have 20 contracts because I’m dealing with 10 or 15 different contractors in industry, which is literally what acquisition reform is telling us to do,” Purdy said.
“We have a serious issue here at a federal level on contracting and it’s just the numbers of folks. We do not have the numbers of contractors that we need at a federal level. Every federal agency has problems, and so we do not have the right numbers that we need,” he added.
Saltzman said the service is trying to ease the strain by requesting waivers to the hiring freeze that has been in place since the start of the Trump administration, as well as hiring authorities to fill essential acquisition and contracting roles.
The service also recently launched its first acquisition training course.
Kay Sears, vice president and general manager of space, intelligence and weapon systems development at Boeing, said that while the Space Force acquisition community is more open and collaborative than ever, it is also apparent that the service’s workforce is stretched thin.
“You can tell that they’re stressed. You can tell that they’re overworked. And then when you get into that contracting element that’s really where I see the slowdown, the, ‘Hey, I’ve only got one playbook — I’m going to go follow the playbook,’ and we really start to lose sight of the mission objective,” Sears said.
Acquisition experts have said that while the proposed acquisition changes could meaningfully reshape how the Pentagon buys capabilities, the success of Hegseth’s reforms will hinge on whether the department can equip the workforce with the skills needed to operate differently.
“Scores of case studies have shown, there has to also be an aggressive, intentional and holistic approach to change management, prominently including how the relevant workforces are developed. Absent re-aligning those processes, real change will remain elusive,” Stan Soloway, president and CEO of Celero Strategies and federal acquisition expert, told Federal News Network.
]]>
Copyright
© 2025 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.
