The Department of Defense could report better information to
Congress regarding unit cost performance of major defense
acquisition programs than is required, to help in
authorization and appropriations deliberations, according
to a new report from the Government Accountability Office.
Defense is required to report to Congress on major
acquisitions representing over $1 trillion, including a
comparison of program costs to a baseline that represents
cost, quantity, schedule and performance goals — but when
goals are changed and the project is “rebaselined,” then
compared with its prior baseline as is typically the
practice, only a narrow view is possible and Congress
does not get an accurate picture of how the project
performs over time, according to GAO-05-182.
In calling for a longer-term perspective, it said that
while comparing the latest unit cost estimate with the
most recent approved baseline does provide Congress with
valuable information, it’s merely one perspective on
performance — one that “shortens the period of
performance reported and resets the measurement of
cost growth to zero.”
Congress could also benefit from “the cumulative unit
cost growth, in constant dollars, that a program has
experienced since the first full baseline was established,”
said GAO.
It said for example, the department reported in its 2003
selected acquisition report that the FA-22 Raptor
program’s unit cost dropped by a third in the prior
four months since recalculating the baseline, but it
said nothing of the fact that the program’s unit cost
had cumulatively increased by 72 percent over 143 months,
which is the kind of long term change Congress does not
get to see from one budget request to the next.
Further, DoD classifies about 50 percent of the SAR
reports to Congress even though “only a small amount of
data in each of these SARs is actually classified,” said
GAO, adding that congressional oversight is “unnecessarily
constrained.”
