The United States Government Printing Office (GPO) was created in June 1860, and is an agency of the U.S. federal government based in Washington D.C. The office prints documents produced by and for the federal government, including Congress, the Supreme Court, the Executive Office of the President and other executive departments, and independent agencies. A hearing is a meeting of the Senate, House, joint or certain Government committee that is open to the public so that they can listen in on the opinions of the legislation. Hearings can also be held to explore certain topics or a current issue. It typically takes between two months up to two years to be published. This is one of those hearings.

Pentagon spending has been the target of decades of criticism and reform efforts. Billions of dollars are spent on weapons programs that are later abandoned. State-of-the-art data centers are underutilized and overstaffed. New business systems are built at great expense but fail to meet the needs of their users. Every Secretary of Defense for the last five Administrations has made it a priority to address perceived bloat and inefficiency by making management reform a major priority. The congressional defense committees have been just as active, enacting hundreds of legislative provisions. Yet few of these initiatives produce significant results, and the Pentagon appears to go on, as wasteful as ever. In this book, Peter Levine addresses why, despite a long history of attempted reform, the Pentagon continues to struggle to reduce waste and inefficiency. The heart of Defense Management Reform is three case studies covering civilian personnel, acquisitions, and financial management. Narrated with the insight of an insider, the result is a clear understanding of what went wrong in the past and a set of concrete guidelines to plot a better future.