Katherine Boyle: NDAA's FORGE bill could be 'sea change' for defense startups by removing past performance requirements

Summary

Katherine Boyle, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, argues the 2025 NDAA is the most consequential defense procurement reform in roughly a decade, and that for the first time she sees genuine alignment across Congress, the Pentagon, and both parties on the need for structural change.

The FORGE Bill and Past Performance Reform

The centerpiece of Boyle's policy push is the FORGE bill, championed in the Senate by Senator Wicker. An op-ed co-authored with Wicker ran in the Washington Post on September 22. The bill's most significant provision targets the removal of past performance requirements from large defense contracts, a change Boyle calls a potential "sea change" for the industry.

Past performance requirements have functionally tilted contract awards toward legacy primes, companies with decades of DOD relationships, regardless of actual capability. Under current rules, a company like Anduril, despite being a multi-thousand-employee defense technology firm, is still treated as a newcomer relative to contractors with 30 to 40 years of history. Removing that requirement would force competition on product merit alone.

The FORGE bill also targets procurement culture inside the Pentagon. Language in the bill would create explicit incentives for procurement officers who award contracts to nontraditional vendors, rewarding those who prioritize warfighter capability over institutional inertia. Boyle says Pentagon leadership is actively asking who the internal heroes of this shift are so they can be publicly recognized.

Manufacturing Renaissance and the Valley of Death

Boyle frames the broader defense tech investment thesis around production, not just innovation. She draws a direct parallel between the modular manufacturing principles used by SpaceX, Crusoe Energy, and ExoWatt in data center and energy infrastructure and what she believes is the correct model for defense hardware, drones, and missile production. The goal is commodity-scale output, replacing million-dollar-per-unit weapons with systems priced closer to $50,000 through modular, repeatable manufacturing.

On the venture side, production-focused hardware companies have shifted from uninvestable to hot. Boyle notes that investor aversion to hardware that was prevalent five years ago has reversed, and that well-capitalized production companies are now also accessing debt financing to scale facilities alongside equity raises. She characterizes a first generation of defense production companies as starting around 2017 to 2018, with a second generation launching around early 2022 and now scaling faster than their predecessors.

Anduril's Ohio manufacturing facility and Saronix's shipyard acquisition in Franklin are cited as concrete examples of private capital deploying into regions with legacy manufacturing workforces. The speaker of the House attended the Saronix opening.

Talent Pipeline and the Government Engineering Deficit

Boyle endorses a structural push to route engineering talent into government on short rotations. Scott Cooper, former managing partner at a16z for 16 years and now director of the Office of Personnel Management, is overseeing an initiative to attract early-career engineers into federal roles for two-to-four-year stints. Boyle points to elevated unemployment among CS graduates as a near-term opportunity for the government to recruit young technical talent that industry has not yet absorbed. She argues the private sector should explicitly reward, not discount, government service when evaluating candidates post-rotation.