You Get the Workforce You Grade For

Every kid figures out the report card before they figure out the subject.

Doesn't matter what the syllabus says. Doesn't matter what the poster on the classroom wall says about curiosity and growth. If the grade comes from the multiple-choice test on Friday, that's what gets studied. Kids aren't dumb. They optimize for the thing that goes home to their parents.

The acquisition workforce is exactly the same, and I mean that as a compliment. The 150,000 or so acquisition professionals WarU serves are some of the sharpest optimizers in government. Since DAWIA stood the whole system up in November 1990 (career fields, certification levels, the university itself), they've been handed a report card that grades on one question above all others: did anything go wrong on your watch. Not "did the warfighter get the thing." Did the protest get sustained. Did the IG find a gap in the file. Did the money expire unobligated. Zero defects gets you an A.

So we got a zero-defects workforce. We graded for it.

And it's not like nobody noticed. Back in January 2011, Congress wrote into 10 U.S.C. 1701a that the purpose of the entire workforce chapter is a professional acquisition workforce "in which excellence and contribution to mission is rewarded." Go find the performance plan from the last fifteen years that actually measured contribution to mission. I'll wait.

What's different this time is the target.

Section 826 of the FY26 NDAA, signed December 18, 2025, is titled "Restructuring of performance evaluation metrics for the acquisition workforce." Read that title again. Not a new pathway, not a new chart. The report card itself. The Under Secretary for A&S followed with a June 15 memo establishing Key Performance Objectives for the workforce, and in August, WarU put out the implementing memo. Starting with the FY27 performance cycle, which begins October 1, a month from now, every covered civilian acquisition employee's performance plan has to carry at least one Strategic Outcome KPO (what mission outcome you're on the hook for) and at least one Workforce Behavioral KPO (how you're expected to get there). The behavioral list, verbatim: "acquisition judgment, collaboration, innovation, responsible risk-taking, end-user engagement, and continuous learning." And that data is meant to feed hiring, assignments, promotions, awards, training, and certification.

Responsible risk-taking. On a federal performance plan. The November 7, 2025 memo that kicked off the Warfighting Acquisition System said it even plainer: "monetary incentive awards for appropriate risk taking," and leadership training that will "challenge entrenched risk-averse behaviors."

I've been around this business a while and I can't think of a time the grading rubric itself got named as the problem. We rewrite the syllabus constantly... new FAR, new DFARS, new pathway, new chart. Back-to-Basics in 2022 collapsed 14 career fields into six and tossed the old three-level certification model. Good change. Still a syllabus change. The report card didn't move an inch. This is the first time somebody went after the report card.

Good. Now let's be real about why it's hard.

Who's holding the pen

The KPO gets written and rated by a supervisor who spent twenty years earning A's under the old rubric. A branch chief who made GS-14 by never having a file come back red is now supposed to write "took an appropriate risk that didn't pan out, rated fully successful" on a subordinate's appraisal and mean it. Some will. Plenty will write the new words over the old grading, and the plan will say Behavioral KPO while the actual grade is still "nothing went wrong." A report card only changes when the grader changes what they're looking for, and there's no memo for that.

The other report card

The one from your boss isn't the only one that follows you around the building. GAO's FY25 numbers: 1,688 cases filed, 380 protests decided on the merits, 53 sustained. That's a 14 percent sustain rate, but a 52 percent effectiveness rate, meaning in more than half of the protests the protester got some relief, mostly because the agency took corrective action rather than defend the file. The top three reasons for a sustain? Unreasonable technical evaluation, unreasonable cost or price evaluation, unreasonable rejection of a proposal. Every one of those is a judgment call a person made, and everybody in the building knows whose file it was.

Then there's the IG. The audit community. The obligation-rate slide in the quarterly PEO review. The unliquidated balances question from the Hill. None of those graders got the KPO memo. The transcript that actually follows you still grades zero defects.

So now there are two report cards. The new one says take responsible risks. The old one, the one that still shows up in the protest decision and the audit finding, says don't. Guess which one a rational 1102 studies for.

You can't grade what you can't see

A Strategic Outcome KPO is supposed to tie a person to a mission outcome. Great. Which outcome, measured how, from what data? Most contracting shops can tell you PALT and obligation rates cold, because those are the two numbers the old report card asked for. Time from validated need to fielded capability? That mostly lives in PowerPoint. If the outcome metric isn't instrumented, the rating collapses back to the metrics that are, and those are the old ones wearing a new name.

Here's the constructive part, because anybody can complain about a report card.

First thing: grade the graders. If a supervisor's own Behavioral KPO doesn't include rating a subordinate up for a well-reasoned risk that didn't work out, the whole thing is a poster on the wall. The November memo already talks about tying incentive compensation to delivery time and mission outcomes for PAEs and program managers. Push that same logic down to the branch chief.

Second, and this is the one nobody's saying out loud: reconcile the two report cards. When a contracting officer takes a documented, reasoned risk and the protest goes against her, that shouldn't be a demerit, provided the reasoning is in the file. Make the D&F, the memo to file, the market research record the thing that gets rated. "Responsible" doesn't mean it worked. It means somebody thought it through and wrote it down. And a reasoned file happens to be what wins at GAO anyway, so this isn't even a tradeoff.

Last one: instrument the outcome. If we're going to grade people on capability delivery, the clock from need to fielding has to run in a system instead of on a slide. Digitize the workflow, let the machine pull the timeline out of the documents themselves, and the Strategic Outcome metric shows up for free. Yes, that's the business I'm in. It's also just true.

The workforce figured out the old report card in about a semester. They'll figure this one out too. The only question is whether the grade they end up optimizing for is the one on the new plan, or the one that still comes home from GAO.