Congress Passes Fastener-Friendly Defense Bill

Jason Sandefur

Congress approved legislation that would give them some relief from specialty metals restrictions for suppliers to the Department of Defense.
The fiscal 2008 defense authorization bill revises language in last year’s defense bill that stipulated that all specialty metals, including titanium, zirconium and certain steel alloys, supplied to the Pentagon come from domestic sources.
Industrial Fasteners Institute lobbyist Jennifer Baker told FastenerNews.com on Tuesday that she was attending meetings to figure out the implications in the new bill.
If signed into law, the new language appears to eliminate the need for DoD to issue a special waiver for fasteners and other products. DoD issued a Domestic Non-Availability Determination (DNAD) for fasteners following passage of last year’s defense bill.
The previous defense authorization bill also addressed the issue of current inventories by providing for a “one-time waiver,” which allows the secretary of defense to accept specialty metals that were incorporated into items produced, manufactured, or assembled in the U. S. before the date of the 2007 law.
Before compromising on the 2008 defense reauthorization bill, the House had passed a version that would have placed new restrictions on products that include specialty metals by requiring DoD to evaluate contractors whose products contain specialty metals on the extent to which they “demonstrate a record of sustained reinvestment in domestic production of such material” (see FIN 11/01/07).
The Pentagon appealed the measure, saying the House bill “would introduce unnecessary, costly, inefficient, and counter-productive evaluation criteria on every sub-tier supplier providing items containing steel or specialty metals.”
“The proposed changes in the House version of the FY08 NDAA would undo the modest changes made last year that created needed flexibility in the system, and they would add additional administrative hurdles to an already cumbersome process,” Baker told FastenerNews.com in November. �2008 FastenerNews.com