John Cannaday has been named director of the Office of Procurement at Marshall Space Flight Center.
Cannaday will oversee more than 130 civil service and contract employees and supervise work on more than 500 active contracts, grants, and cooperative agreements. He will lead planning and execution of all Marshall procurements for a range of multiprogram and institutional activities, including source selections, sole source procurements, contract negotiation and administration, construction of facilities, contract closeout and termination, and administration of small and minority business programs, contract reviews, cost analysis, and grants.
Before joining NASA, Cannaday was associate deputy assistant secretary (contracting) from 2020-22 for the Air Force at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. There, he assisted the deputy assistant secretary in managing all contract oversight and support related to the acquisition of weapons systems, logistics support, materiel, and services for the Air Force. He also oversaw the training, organization, and equipping of a workforce of some 8,000 contracting professionals who executed programs worth more than $65 billion annually. He was appointed in 2020 to the Senior Executive Service, the personnel system covering top managerial positions in federal agencies.
Over the course of his active-duty military and government civilian career, he worked at seven military departments and defense agencies, performing a broad spectrum of acquisition and contracting missions. From 2017-20, he was deputy director of contracts, operations, and services for the Missile Defense Agency on Redstone Arsenal, where he led contracting directorate operations and services, overseeing policy, pricing, and business operations support.
From 2010-17, he was a professor of contract management at the Defense Acquisition University-South in Huntsville, teaching fundamentals of acquisition, contract administration, contracting regulations, and program management to future contracting professionals. From 2006-10, while completing his active military career, he was director of procurement for the U.S. Special Operations Command’s Office of Acquisition, Research and Development at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. From 2004-06, he was chief of multinational logistics and contracting for the U.S. Central Command’s Directorate of Logistics at MacDill. From 2001-03, he commanded Air Force Space Command’s 50th Contracting Squadron in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and from 1999-2001, he commanded Defense Contract Management Agency-Korea, situated at Gimhae Air Base in Busan, South Korea. Prior to that, he held numerous key contracting positions at Air Force offices and bases in Ohio, Virginia, California and Colorado.
Cannaday graduated from the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1984 with a bachelor’s degree in business administration and immediately entered the Air Force. He also received a master’s in contract management in 1989 from the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, and a second master’s in strategic studies in 2004 from the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery.
Cannaday lives in Huntsville with his wife, Louie, and youngest child, Eli. He also has four other children: Daniel, Patt, Nick, and Kara Drake.
