The unending woes of the over-budget, under-performing, behind-schedule National Polar-Orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) may have been inevitable even before the program began, Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.) indicated.
Not one or two, but three agencies, are running the NPOESS program, and that guarantees that too many people are involved in every decision, Bartlett said at an hours-long hearing of the House Science and Technology Committee energy and environment subcommittee to probe the latest glitches in the NPOESS program. (Please see full story in this issue.)
“Too darn many people are responsible for it,” Bartlett said. “Why not have one person responsible, one person making decisions?”
While the number of contractors involved is not unusual, the number of government agencies at the helm is.
Northrop Grumman Corp. [NOC] is the prime contractor for NPOESS; Raytheon Co. [RTN] is the largest subcontractor and principal teammate, responsible for developing the data processing and command and control segments.
Some of Bartlett’s comments were directed at the bureaucracy involved in the program.
The tri-agency Integrated Program Office — composed of the Department of Commerce National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Defense and NASA — is managing development of NPOESS.
Bartlett drew backing for his concerns from the other side of the aisle, from the subcommittee chairman, Rep. Nick Lampson (D-Texas).
The next time someone comes before the panel asking for approval of a multi-agency procurement program, Lampson said, lawmakers should “keep in mind [that we] learned our lesson.”
His ranking Republican counterpart, Rep. Bob Inglis of South Carolina, likewise said that the more complex a program is, and the more difficult it is to run, the more it tends to get pushed aside on executives’ desks.
Perhaps, Inglis said, programs where multiple agencies have an interest in the product procured should be structured with one agency running the program, and the other two or more being “customers or tenants” of that lead agency or platform.
Bartlett also said that when costs rise, features are removed from items the government purchases, and schedules are missed, contractors involved may not suffer.
Rather, Bartlett said, overruns are fine for companies the government hires. “The more it costs, the more contractors make,” he said. In other words, contractors are rewarded for being slow and for driving up the price of a product.
At this point, Bartlett said he doesn’t immediately have a solution for this situation. “How do we get around that?” he asked.
His complaint was amply buttressed in a recent hearing on the other side of Capitol Hill, where Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, recently ripped into the enormous proliferation of cost overruns in procurement programs. (Please see Space & Missile Defense Report, Monday, June 9, 2008.)
Levin decried the $295 billion of cost overruns discovered in a wide array of procurement programs, citing four egregious examples, one of them being NPOESS.
Bartlett voiced similar exasperation, asking, “How come we never, never get it right” in establishing and leading acquisition programs?