The Pentagon is set to make major spending and staff reductions to its Congressionally mandated testing office, according to a memo from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
The move cuts civilian personnel at the Office of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, known throughout the Defense Department as DOT&E, by about 74 percent and slashes its budget by almost 80 percent. The office currently budgets for a staff of 118 civilians and costs the Pentagon about $377 million to operate, according to the Fiscal Year 2025 Defense Department budget documents.
“A comprehensive internal review has identified redundant, nonessential, non-statutory functions within ODOT &E that do not support operational agility or resource efficiency, affecting our ability to rapidly and effectively deploy the best systems to the warfighter,” reads the May 27 memo.
The cuts reduce the office to 30 civilians and 15 uniformed personnel, with one person in the Senior Executive Service leading the Pentagon shop. The memo also ends contractor assignments to the office.
Hegseth tapped Carroll Quade, the Navy’s deputy for test and evaluation, to perform the duties of the DOT&E. The memo said the cuts will save the Pentagon over $300 million.
Within seven days of the memo, the civilians who do not remain in the office will get a formal reduction in force notice. Civilians working for a specific branch within the office will go back to their respective services, which can decide whether or not to keep the returning personnel, according to the memo. Contractors must also stop working for the office within seven days.
“If ODOT &E decides it needs support contractor personnel after adjusting to its base statutory mission set, ODOT &E may request such contractor support with Deputy Secretary of Defense review after an initial 60-day acclimation period,” reads the memo.
The changes would amount to the largest restructuring of the office since Congress established it in 1983 to provide independent evaluations of the Pentagon’s major programs.
Robert Behler, a longtime test pilot who led DOT&E during the first Trump administration, said the cuts will prevent the office from fulfilling its duties under the Congressional statute.
“I don’t think they will have the resources to be able to accomplish all those tasks with only … a couple handfuls of people, 30 people. It’s an enormous job, especially the annual report,” Behler told USNI News in an interview last week.
Putting an end to hiring consultants could create challenges for the office because it relies on them to analyze the testing data, Behler said.
“I don’t think a lot of research was done into the requirements in the law about DOT&E because one of the clearer things that it states is that the director shall have sufficient staff of military and civilian personnel to enable the director to carry out the responsibilities and duties in the law,” he told USNI News. “Taking all of the people away, you’re going to have to change the law because you’re not going to be able to satisfy the law if you don’t have the people to do it.”
Congress created the DOT&E in 1983, several years after multiple accidents involving Titan II intercontinental ballistic missiles in Arkansas, including the 1980 Damascus explosion, when a Titan missile outfitted with a nuclear warhead detonated in its silo.
Under the statute, the DOT&E office must conduct a “field test, under realistic combat conditions, of any item of (or key component of) weapons, equipment, or munitions for the purpose of determining the effectiveness and suitability of the weapons, equipment, or munitions for use in combat by typical military users,” according to the Congressional code.
The director of the office reports to the Secretary of Defense and under the Congressional statute must submit an annual report to lawmakers that details the operational test results for the major acquisition programs. In addition to writing the annual report, DOT&E also helps program offices throughout the Pentagon develop better tests and conducts testing oversight.
In its early days, there were 26 positions at DOT&E, according to a 1987 Government Accountability Office report. At the time, 24 of those slots were filled. The report categorized 18 of the jobs as “professional” and eight as “administrative.”
“In October 1986, DOT&E estimated a need for 40 professional staff members to carry out its assigned responsibilities,” the GAO report reads. “Presently, responsibilities, to help carry out the DOT&E supplements the staff by using contractor personnel.”
Since then, defense budgets have grown and technology has rapidly changed. In an era of constantly evolving software, today’s weapons systems are much more complex than the ones the office tested in the 1980s, according to Nickolas Guertin, who led DOT&E for two years under the Biden administration.
“The world’s a more complicated place,” Guertin told USNI News. “It’s harder to test these systems. It takes more analysis.”
One potential reform for DOT&E, according to Behler and Guertin, could be combining developmental and operational testing, which are currently separate offices. That could look like merging the Pentagon’s under-secretary of defense for research and engineering office and the DOT&E, according to Guertin.
“If all things are software-intensive, the test and evaluation paradigm needs to go earlier in the developmental cycle and be part of that continuum,” he told USNI News.
Behler, a retired Air Force test pilot, said combining the developmental and operational testing under one organization would reduce testing time and get weapons systems and platforms in the hands of service members faster, and ultimately make the acquisition process function better.
He said the Defense Department needs to reassess its testing process, which hasn’t changed since Congress established DOT&E in the 1980s.
“We’re testing exactly the same way we did decades ago. It’s sequential: contractor tests, then they hand it over to the experimental test pilots to test and then when they’re comfortable, they hand it to the operational testers and then they test it to see if it’s operationally effective and suitable,” Behler told USNI News.
Statutorily, the office is not allowed to do developmental testing, according to Guertin, but the Pentagon could work with Congress to change that and alter the testing process.
The cuts to DOT&E come as the Department of Defense begins pursuing new major acquisition programs like the Air Force’s sixth-generation F-47 fighter and the Golden Dome missile project.
Staff at DOT&E have speculated that the cuts are a retaliatory response to the office putting the Golden Dome on its oversight docket, according to one person familiar with the matter. The oversight list is publicly available and programs with large price tags are automatically added.
When asked for additional information about the cuts, a spokesperson for the Defense Department pointed USNI News to Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell’s statement accompanying the memo’s release.
“This decision eliminates redundancy in the defense acquisition system, returns DOT&E to its statutory intent as an oversight body, and empowers the Services and Combatant Commands with greater trust to ensure the warfighter is efficiently equipped to address emerging challenges and to preserve our decisive advantage,” Parnell said in the statement.
But former directors of the office are puzzled.
“It’s like sidelining the fire marshal in the middle of a wildfire,” Guertin said. “We are in the middle of building and fielding amazing things. And we’re going to take that independent view and reduce it in scope and scale.”
Behler said the cuts won’t speed up the delivery of systems to the warfighter, but they might slow it down because it will take longer to develop and test platforms and capabilities.
“When you go into combat, there are three things. One is you have to believe in yourself and all your training that you’ve done. Two, you have to believe that these orders are important and that it’s an important mission that you have to go out there and perhaps put your life on the line,” Behler said.
“And three, you’ve got to believe in [sic] your weapons systems are going to work the way they’re advertised to work. And you only know that if you have a very thorough operational test and evaluation before you hand it over to the operation.”
