U.S. SPEED Act: The Government Procurement Game-Changer?!

Over the past few months, I’ve been watching the evolution of the SPEED Act unfold with great interest—and cautious optimism. The recently introduced SPEED Act (Streamlining Procurement for Effective Execution and Delivery) marks one of the boldest overhauls of U.S. defense procurement in decades. With global threats evolving at unprecedented speed, the Act seeks to turn America’s procurement machine from a bureaucratic behemoth into an agile, adaptive force enabler.

But how can not only the U.S. gain real speed? The LAP Alliance already delivers what the SPEED Act envisions—and we’re ready to help kickstart its implementation with proven, field-tested solutions.

🧩 SPEED Act: New Ambitions at a Glance

The SPEED Act introduces five key shifts in defense acquisition:

✅ From 2–3 years to 90 days: Compress the time from identifying a need to signing a contract
✅ Iterative development & early course correction: Start with viable capabilities, test fast, learn fast
✅ Encouraging experimentation: Prototyping, risk-taking, and field learning are now encouraged
✅ Open to innovation: Startups and commercial tech can be more easily integrated
✅ A new legal mission: Procurement's objective shifts to ensuring military effectiveness and technological superiority, not just cost-efficient compliance

The United States faces the most dangerous security environment since World War II. China’s military buildup, Russia’s war in Ukraine, Iran’s proxy warfare, and North Korea’s nuclear provocations demand that America maintain a credible deterrent and a decisive warfighting edge. But the U.S. defense acquisition system is too slow, rigid, and bureaucratic to deliver critical capabilities to warfighters at the necessary speed and scale.

The Streamlining Procurement for Effective Execution and Delivery (SPEED) Act is a bipartisan initiative led by House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-AL) and Ranking Member Adam Smith (D-WA) to overhaul the Pentagon’s broken acquisition system. Rather than working around systemic constraints, the SPEED Act tackles defense acquisition challenges head-on by cutting red tape, accelerating timelines, increasing competition, and empowering decision-makers.

🎙️ Join Hudson Senior Fellows Bryan Clark and Dan Patt for a discussion with Chairman Rogers and Ranking Member Smith about the SPEED Act and why fixing defense acquisition and reviving the defense industrial base are essential to meeting America’s national security challenges.

📄 Read the full SPEED Act
➡️ Download the official SPEED Act (PDF)

🚀 Has Business Agility Finally Landed in Government Procurement?

Reading the SPEED Act, it’s hard not to feel a sense of déjà vu — but the good kind.

If you’ve been working in Agile Transformation, especially in complex systems, much of what’s written into the SPEED Act feels familiar. Almost eerily so. For the first time, it seems that Business Agility is no longer confined to the private sector. It’s being codified — in law — at the heart of Defense Acquisition and, by extension, government procurement.

Let’s take a moment to test this intuition.

Below is a side-by-side comparison of the Agile Manifesto — the original compass of agile thinking — and the core ambitions and mechanisms of the SPEED Act.

In short: The SPEED Act is Agile in disguise.

But bold ambition alone isn’t enough.

⚙️ Turning Reform Into Reality – The Execution Gap

Changing laws is hard. Changing culture and behavior is harder.

The SPEED Act provides the "what"—a new legal framework, authorities, and incentives.
But the "how"—getting practitioners, agencies, and suppliers to work differently—will determine its success.

This is where proven models like Lean-Agile Procurement (LAP) come in.

💡 Need some inspiration?

Check out my observations and recommendations on a real case - the Swiss F-35 Procurement:

💡 A Kickstart to SPEED

The Lean-Agile Procurement Alliance has spent the last decade designing, testing, and scaling next-generation procurement practices across government, defense, and industry in over 25 countries.

Here’s what LAP brings to the table:

✅ 1. Proven frameworks for iterative procurement

With the Lean Procurement Canvas, teams can co-design scope, value, and partner fit in days—not months.

✅ 2. Accelerator for Pathfinder teams

We offer training and coaching to PEOs and Pathfinder pilots to apply agile cycles, de-risk innovation, and make faster, better-informed decisions.

✅ 3. Playbooks for commercial collaboration

From engaging startups to scaling public-private partnerships, LAP provides lightweight models that fit the SPEED Act’s innovation goals.

✅ 4. A proven contractual framework for agile collaboration and speed
Our Agile-enabled contracting models support co-creation, iteration, and transparency—providing the legal scaffolding for fast, trust-based partnerships within government constraints.

✅ 5. Cultural & structural transformation
We not only shift the mindset of procurement professionals toward agility and value delivery—we also enable the structural transformation of Pathfinder teams into agile procurement organizations designed for speed.

🚀 Move fast with clarity. The The Lean Procurement Canvas is your one-page, living tool for co-creating strategic partnerships, aligning on dependencies, and iterating at speed—just like the startups work:

🎯 Final Thought: From Policy to Velocity—Time to Move

The SPEED Act sets the legal groundwork for a new era of defense acquisition—one built on adaptability, experimentation, and mission-first thinking.

But it needs a catalyst.

That’s why the LAP Alliance is ready to partner with the U.S. defense ecosystem to operationalize SPEED, one Pathfinder at a time.

Let’s not wait for culture to catch up.
Let’s design it into the system—iteratively, collaboratively, and at mission speed.

Ready to kickstart SPEED?
Let’s connect and co-create the future of defense procurement.

📩 Contact me

You wanna know more - Contact me or any of my LAP Alliance Board Members or Certified LAP Trainers

Mirko Kleiner President LAP Alliance. mirko.kleiner@lap-alliance.org, +41796011990