Army brings back ‘night court’ audit of programs, shifting more than $100M

The Army may have a new take on acquisition and modernization, but senior leaders have brought back an innovation from the first Trump administration: top-to-bottom reviews of program spending.

“Night court,” as the Army calls it, started in 2018. Then-Army Secretary Mark Esper and Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley would meet up at the end of the day to hunt through reams of Army program documents for savings. Ultimately, tens of billions of dollars were reprogrammed to new priorities.

Over the summer, service leaders relaunched the effort to evaluate the Army’s many programs.

“Everything from basic research, all the way up—how is that lining into where we're actually taking the Army, from a modernization perspective?” Brent Ingraham, the Army’s civilian acquisition chief, told reporters Thursday of the new round of night courts.

They started with science and technology programs earlier in the summer, Ingraham said, ensuring that the Army’s basic research was aligned with larger goals in the new Portfolio Acquisition Executive offices, which are now responsible for the entire lifecycle of an Army program.

“We roughly found, I'll say, a little over $100 million of S&T funds that could better be realigned to match where the portfolios were headed,” he said.

Next they reviewed foreign military sales contracts.

“How can we improve on delivery of those capabilities?” Ingraham said. “And so it's really sort of looking at how we become better partners to our allies and partners on delivery of capabilities.”

Sustainment is the most recent bucket added to the review, he said. PAEs are reviewing their programs to realign what it will cost to sustain current and planned programs, what can be cancelled, and where they might save money by bringing maintenance in-house.

“The Army sort of fundamentally changed how we do budgeting, inside the department as well,” Ingraham said. “And so now the PAEs get to see the whole portfolio, not just traditional procurement and [research, development, testing and evaluation] dollars, but they see the [operations and maintenance] and the S&T dollars, so they can understand how it fits across the whole portfolio.”