The cost to develop, procure, operate and maintain a next-generation system currently being developed to automatically detect and alert for harmful biological threats in the environment is $5.7 billion, according to congressional members and a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official.
That would make the Generation-3 BioWatch program one of the most expensive single programs within the department. The Gen-3 program is being managed by the DHS Office of Health Affairs (OHA), which itself has a relatively small budget, $167.4 million in FY ’12 and $166.5 million requested in FY ’13.
At a hearing yesterday to examine OHA’s FY ’13 request, Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Emergency Preparedness, Response, and Communications, Rep. Lisa Richardson (D-Calif.), ranking member on the panel, and Alexander Garza, assistant secretary for Health Affairs at DHS, all mentioned the $5.7 billion figure for the Gen-3 program.
The billions of dollars in potential Gen-3 funding is a life-cycle cost estimate covering 20 years and includes the proposed expansion of BioWatch into additional cities, indoor environments and greater coverage of the population, a spokesman for OHA told Defense Daily.
Currently, OHA and its state and local partners in more than 30 urban areas around the United States operate Generation 1 and 2 BioWatch systems, which basically consist of collectors that routinely take in aerosol samples for manual retrieval and analysis by a network of laboratories around the country. That process is costly and slow, with the time to detect a potential threat ranging from 12 to 36 hours.
The goal of the Gen-3 program is to automate the laboratory functions in a box along with the collector, lowering detection times to between four to six hours, and then communicating the results in real-time to various public health authorities.
Development of the Gen-3 system has been beset with numerous delays amounting to years. As recently as last fall, OHA had hoped to begin a four-city operational test and evaluation phase later this year but that effort has been pushed into 2013, at the earliest. Earlier this month, DHS said the release of a Request for Proposals (RFP) for phase two of Gen-3 is being delayed from the second quarter of FY ’12 to the fourth quarter (Defense Daily, March 19). If all goes according to plan, DHS expects to make a phase two award in the third or fourth quarter of FY ’13, the OHA spokesman said.
While initially underselling the complexity of the technical challenge in developing the Gen-3 technology, not to mention the difficulty in working with state and local around operational concepts for the system, DHS the past two years or so has been taking a more deliberate approach with the program.
Phase one of the Gen-3 program wrapped up last year with prototypes developed and built by Northrop Grumman [NOC] being field tested in Chicago. Those results are still being analyzed.
“So it’s a first of kind technology,” Garza said. “Nobody else in the world has developed this type of technology so the pause after phase one of acquisition is very important so we can take a look at, ‘Hey, what are the things that worked very, very well in phase one? What are the things that didn’t work as well as we needed them to?’ So that we can then go back and say, ‘Look, these things are exactly where they need to be or they need to be improved upon.’”
When the final RFP does come out, it will be a full and open competition. Garza said that from the time the OT&E phase begins until a production decision is made, would be about 18 months.
However, Garza cautioned that given the complexity of the program, schedule slips can be expected. He also said in OT&E phase “we have to make sure that it’s hitting all of these markers before we even talk about procuring the machines. We don’t want to invest the $5.7 billion over the lifetime of the program unless we’re relatively sure, absolutely sure, that this is going to fit the bill. So we’re still in that test and evaluation period right now and I make no guarantees that it will go through procurement.”
Bilirakis and Richardson both expressed concerns about the ability of the Gen-3 program to eventually prove worthy.
“I and other members have become increasingly concerned about the viability of this developing technology, and also about OHA’s ability to deploy it on time and within budget,” Bilirakis said in his opening statement. “Any new BioWatch program, particularly one that will cost $5.7 billion, must prove that it provides a substantial improvement over current technologies, and that communities in which it will be deployed are fully on board with using it.”
Bilirakis noted that the Government Accountability Office is conducting a study into Gen-3 effort “due to serious concerns” within Congress about the program. He said that no comprehensive cost-benefit analysis has been done for the program to ensure that risk is being bought down “to justify the expenditure” of $5.7 billion.
Garza replied that the acquisition strategy is about “buying down risk” in terms of spending on something that won’t work as needed as improving the nation’s defenses against a biological attack. He noted that the recovery amounts from the anthrax attacks that shook the country in 2001 were in the billions of dollars, combined with the “risk averse” acquisition strategy, “we feel like we are doing a very good job of balancing the risk-benefit ratio.” Garza said he believes that OHA has built “enough” of a risk to benefit analysis into the acquisition strategy “to make it much more comfortable for us going forward.”
DHS is requesting $125.3 million for BioWatch in FY ’13, with $85.4 million to be devoted to maintaining the current deployed systems and related operations and $39.9 million toward the Gen-3 program. The proposed funding represents an $11.1 million increase overall for BioWatch, with the Gen-3 effort seeking $16 million more.