secretary james geurts. >> mr. chairman, ranking member read and members of the committee. thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today that apartment of the navy has embraced the recent acquisition reforms on multiple fronts and we are actively pursuing initiatives to capitalize on the new midtier acquisition authorities provided in fiscal year 2016 and 2017 nda a and we continue to leverage tools to drive out procurement costs and assist the workforce and made meaningful progress and will continue to be affixed-- a fifth -- efficient managers in our resources. our workforce in particular has made progress advancing are professional and technical challenge space to your support and further meaningful reform must be assisted by predictable funding, timely budgets, avoiding further cr to increase funding levels would reduce market uncertainty and improve our ability to maintain schedule across the department and navy acquisition programs. for funding translates into more capability to learn efficiently producing cycle time and costs in the goals we share here tog