By Emelie Rutherford
The nation’s top auditor told lawmakers yesterday he will look into whether the Pentagon should be placing greater emphasis on the impact on U.S. jobs when planning for major weapon-system contracts.
Gene Dodaro, the acting comptroller general at the Government Accountability Office (GAO), received the request from Rep. Norm Dicks (D-Wash.). The lawmaker wants to know whether the Department of Defense (DoD) is and should be following a defense-acquisition regulation that he believes requires it to examine industrial-base impacts when developing acquisition strategies for major programs.
“I think this is something that we have to insist on,” Dicks said at a hearing of the House Appropriations Defense subcommittee (HAC-D).
“We haven’t done any work on it,” Dodaro said, sitting with GAO auditors. “My team tells me we’d be happy to look at your citation (regarding the law) and to look into the issue.”
Dicks, the HAC-D vice chairman, said he quizzed outgoing Pentagon acquisition czar John Young on the matter, and was left to believe the DoD is not considering the industrial- base impacts to the extent it should.
“This will be something interesting to see, if GAO can find out whether in fact they’re doing this or not,” Dicks said. “I don’t think they are. But they say, ‘We don’t have to.’ Well, I don’t think the law gives them any discretion.”
Dicks has been questioning if the Pentagon is following the regulation–in section 2440 of Title 10 of U.S. Code–since last year (Defense Daily, Sept. 29, 2008). He and other supporters of Boeing‘s [BA] battle for the Air Force aerial-refueling tanker contract argued the government should consider the U.S. jobs lost if a competing team made up of Northrop Grumman [NOC] and European Aeronautic Defence and Space Co. (EADS) prevails.
HAC-D Chairman John Murtha (D-Pa.) and other panel members also lamented yesterday the DoD’s increased use of contractors for governmental functions, and the department’s failure to provide the subcommittee information on such outsourcing. Hiring in-house saves $44,000 person, he said.
“We’re going to force them to find the information, because we can’t make a legitimate decision and recommendation until we get some idea of what a government contractor is, what the government responsibility is,” Murtha said. He said the HAC-D may fence-off funding to spur the Pentagon to share the data, and asked Dodaro for assistance in moving contractor functions to in-house employees at the Pentagon.
Murtha said in a statement the HAC-D is “very concerned” about the Pentagon’s management and acquisition of major weapon systems, noting the recent GAO finding that the total acquisition cost of the DoD’s 2007 portfolio of major developmental and in-production program has grown nearly $300 billion over initial estimates.
Dodaro said the GAO has recommended the DoD address the weapon-system cost problem on two levels–on the strategic level, to ensure the Pentagon makes clear priority choices across the department on weapon-systems, and on the individual-program level, to add more discipline to the process of moving systems through development.
While the DoD has responded to the GAO’s recommendations, Dodaro said the department is not implementing related policies effectively enough.
“That’s one area where we’ve consistently seen DoD have some difficulty,” he said. “So implementation of these new policies is really paramount in bringing about change, to bring cost down and to bring systems in on time”
Murtha told reporters the HAC-D–which does not yet have a fiscal year 2010 defense budget request to scrutinize–will hold “detail hearings” like yesterday’s until April 6. The panel’s next hearing, scheduled for today, is on Army contracting and will feature Lt. Gen. Ross Thompson, the military deputy to the Army’s top acquisition official.
Murtha said he does not know when the Pentagon will send Congress the request for the next war-supplemental funding bill, to cover the latter part of FY ’09. Congressional aides have predicted the request could emerge as soon as next week.
Murtha told reporters he believes the war-funding request will total at least $80 billion.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates in a Dec. 31 letter to lawmakers said the request will be for at least $69.7 billion, but said the figure would likely rise after the Obama administration makes decisions regarding force levels in Afghanistan.
President Obama’s White House and the DoD are still negotiating the FY ’10 base defense budget request, the details of which are expected to be sent to Capitol Hill in late March or early April.
Murtha acknowledged yesterday that the FY ’10 base defense budget will likely not have all war costs folded into it, and thus for at least the next fiscal year Congress will continue considering supplemental war-funding requests from the Pentagon.
Gates similarly told Pentagon reporters Tuesday: “It is now clear that with today’s economic realities, we are unable to place as much as the war cost as we would have liked as soon as we would have liked into the base budget.”
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) has said he expects the FY ’10 budget to have war costs folded into it (Defense Daily, Feb. 4).