Despite a year of the loudest procurement-reform rhetoric in a generation — Executive Orders 14402 and 14271, Secretary Hegseth’s “commercial solutions first” mandate, and Section 1822 of the FY26 NDAA — definitive movement is hard to find. In FY2024, more than two-thirds of all federal contract spend was non-commercial items and services, a share that includes an estimated $130 billion in cost-reimbursement contracts for common services like IT and professional support alone. Madeline Hart’s excellent analysis of DoW spending in FY2025 finds that the department’s own commercial technology share, which fluctuated between just 16-20% since 2012, plateaued around 19 percent in 2025. That’s a narrower and more specific metric than the federal-wide two-thirds figure above, but it points the same direction: DoW’s commercial adoption problem is at least as severe as the government-wide picture, and the needle hardly moved in 2025. Thirty years after Congress mandated a preference for commercial acquisitions under the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act of 1994, the diagnosis is everywhere, the policy is finally moving, but the “how” is still lagging behind.
I say this as someone who has sat inside the acquisition workforce. It was one of the most personally challenging jobs I’ve ever had. Failure was not an option, but navigating a program through layers of regulation, policy, and process that often prioritized compliance over mission outcomes was bewildering and deeply frustrating. What today’s acquisition workforce is being asked to do is even harder: fundamentally transform how the government buys capability while operating with smaller teams, few opportunities to effect change, and accelerating mission timelines.
Now I sit on the other side of the table, leading a company and watching peers with proven commercial solutions stall because the contracting system was never designed to recognize or replicate commercial success. Most commentary on this topic comes from government insiders, law firms, or GovCon business developers writing for contractors. I’m writing as a former federal acquisition professional, and now a commercial product vendor. That changes what I notice and what solutions I think are actually viable.
The Executive Orders, the FAR overhaul efforts, Secretary Hegseth’s commercial-first push, and the Army’s “adopt, adapt, develop” mandate are all pointing toward the same conclusion: stop rebuilding what already exists commercially and move faster to operational capability.
But the conversation around why this is difficult has also become clearer. One of the smartest observations I’ve seen recently framed the challenge not as training, but as untraining. For decades, contracting officers have been conditioned to mitigate risk through procedural adherence. They are talented, dedicated professionals operating exactly as the system shaped them to operate. The tools exist. The templates exist. The DCMA Commercial Item Group exists. FAR Part 12 has been on the books since 1995. And still, roughly two-thirds of all federal contract spend in FY2024 was for non-commercial products and services..
That’s not a policy failure anymore, it’s a behavioral one.
Behavioral change rarely happens because another memo gets issued or another training module gets assigned. It happens when people can see a different path working in practice, and see it rewarded rather than punished.
Chip and Dan Heath describe this well in Switch: don’t design change — find the bright spots. Find what is already working and replicate it. That framework is more useful here than another compliance mandate, because it starts from a fact the reform conversation tends to skip past: the bright spots already exist.
Every command has contracting officers, CORs, and program teams quietly executing commercial acquisitions with speed and confidence. They already know how to use the commercial first authorities and policies that have existed for more than a decade. They know how to move capability faster. They know how to operate without defaulting to a multi-year custom build every time. Right now, that knowledge lives and dies with individuals. It doesn’t get systematized, doesn’t get credited, and doesn’t spread. That’s the gap worth closing.
Three things would close it faster than another executive order.
First, elevate peer champions, not management talking points. Identify the contracting officers and program managers who are already executing commercial buys well, and give them an explicit mandate — and the time on their calendar — to mentor others attempting the same thing. A “see one, do one, teach one” model, borrowed from clinical training, works because it transmits judgment, not just process: the tacit knowledge of how to interpret a FAR Part 12 determination, how to talk to a KO’s leadership about risk tolerance, how to structure a solicitation so a commercial vendor can actually respond. None of that lives in a training module. It lives in people, and right now those people are invisible to the system that most needs them.
Second, create safe-to-fail pilot offices. Pick a handful of contracting offices or program offices — ideally ones already leaning commercial — and explicitly shield them from the career risk that currently attaches to deviating from the legacy path. That means protecting cost, schedule, and audit outcomes on pilot acquisitions from the usual performance scrutiny for a defined window, and being explicit with the workforce that this protection exists. Absent that guardrail, “try the commercial path” is advice that asks individuals to personally absorb institutional risk, and rational people will decline.
Third, make the commercial path the path of least resistance, not just a permitted one. The templates, model contracts, and DCMA Commercial Item Group guidance already exist; what’s missing is default plumbing. If a contracting officer has to actively search for the commercial route while the legacy cost-reimbursement process is pre-populated in every system, template, and checklist they touch, behavior won’t change no matter how many executive orders point the other way. Flip the defaults: make the commercial solicitation template the one that auto-populates, make the DCMA Commercial Item Group’s review the fast lane rather than an extra stop, and make choosing the non-commercial path require the additional paperwork rather than the reverse.
None of these three ideas require new legislation, a FAR rewrite, or waiting for FY2027 budget cycles. They can start inside a single command, this fiscal year, with the authorities that already exist.
It’s also worth being honest about what “progress” should look like while we wait to see if it’s working. Roughly 80 percent of DoW’s budget in any given year is already locked into legacy programs, renewals, and existing contract vehicles — only about 20 percent is genuinely new spend where behavior can change year over year. That means the workforce metrics that matter most, at least in the near term, aren’t topline department-wide percentages, which will move slowly no matter what happens on the ground. They’re what’s happening inside that movable 20 percent: are more of this year’s new contract actions going commercial? Are more program offices adopting the fast-lane defaults? Are more peer champions mentoring the next cohort? Measuring change against the wrong scale will make real progress look like failure, and that’s a fast way to lose the workforce’s confidence in the reform effort itself.
The workforce does not need to be told what to do. It needs to see someone operating under the same constraints do it successfully first, get rewarded for it, and be given an explicit, protected invitation to do the same.