According to Reuters, the Air Force and Navy had working HR systems using Oracle kit, with Accenture and Nakupuna leading the charge. Both projects were declared fit for deployment. Then someone in the DoD decided they would rather burn a pile of cash and cosy up to Salesforce, Palantir and Workday instead.
The Air Force’s $368 million HR revamp, first handed to Accenture in 2019, was based on Oracle software and due to be rolled out this summer at the Air Force Academy. A status report in April described it as “on track” and predicted it would save $39 million a year by replacing legacy systems.
Then on 30 May, acting assistant secretary Darlene Costello slammed the brakes on with a memo calling for a “strategic pause” and a fresh look at technical options. Sources say this U-turn was prompted by internal pressure to hand the project to Salesforce and Peter Thiel’s Palantir.
Costello has since retired.
Space Force was next in line to get the new HR system but it binned that too. Officials there now want to start again with Workday, even going so far as to issue a small business tender that just so happens to be tailored toward recommending Workday.
IT watchdog Information Technology Acquisition Advisory Council director John Weiler called the fiasco a costly do-over designed to reward the “wrong vendors” that do not meet requirements, with a side order of duplication and waste.
The Navy was working with Honolulu-based Nakupuna Companies to unify its payroll and personnel systems into something coherent. The project, named NP2, had burned through $425 million since 2023 but got the thumbs up from third-party assessor Guidehouse back in January.
Despite that, former HR boss Admiral Rick Cheeseman pulled the plug in June, directing staff to cancel the project outright. He was furious that a $171 million data services contract with Pantheon Data got scrapped earlier this year for doing pretty much the same job as NP2.
Emails show Cheeseman was “beyond exasperated” and threatened to strip all funding from NP2 unless the Pantheon contract was revived. He was quite content to sink the working HR project in protest.
Nakupuna said the pause came out of nowhere and was especially baffling given all the reviews confirming the system was the cheapest and fastest option ready to deploy.
The Navy insists it is all about “fiscal responsibility” and “departmental efficiency.” Which sounds suspiciously like it got its talking points from a Salesforce PowerPoint slide.
