From the U.S. Government Accountability Office, www.gao.gov

Transcript for: Watchdog Report #11: Quick Look
Audio interview by GAO staff with Mike Sulivan, Director, Acquisition and Sourcing Management

Released on: March 30, 2010

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[ Narrator: ] Welcome to GAO's Watchdog Report, your source for news and information from the Government Accountability Office. It's March 30th, 2010. For the eighth year, GAO has reviewed the Department of Defense's management of its weapon acquisition programs in a product known as the Quick Look. A group led by Mike Sullivan, Director in GAO's Acquisition and Sourcing Management team, recently completed its latest assessment. GAO analyst Jeremy Cluchey sat down with Mike to learn more. 

[ Jeremy Cluchey: ] What does this latest assessment conclude about how well DOD is planning and executing its weapon acquisition programs? 

[ Mike Sullivan: ] Well I would start with since it is the eighth annual Quick Look, as we call it, that we've done, I would say that this year, for the second year in a row, shows that DOD is improving in some of the key knowledge points that we look for on the acquisition program. So the trend over the last couple of years, and I think it has a lot to do with the work we've done and the legislation that Congress has passed, has been improving because of some of the requirements for technology maturity and design maturity and production maturity, that have been put into their policies. So it's an uptrend. 

[ Jeremy Cluchey: ] One difference between the miss in some previous assessments is that DOD did not issue completed selected acquisition reports.  What are these reports and why were they not issued this year? 

[ Mike Sullivan: ] The selected acquisition reports are mandatory reports. They're legislatively mandated. On an annual basis, all major defense acquisition programs, which has a legislative definition to it, it's basically a threshold of money either for development costs or procurement costs if a program gets up over that threshold of dollars, it becomes what we call an MDAP, a major defense acquisition program. When that happens they are mandated to provide an annual report to the Congress, which is the selected acquisition report, and that report more or less defines unit costs for the program. It provides cost estimates. It's probably the best place you can find information for one of these acquisition programs all in one place. So we're dependent on them. The reason that they didn't have them last year basically was because of the transition from the Bush Administration to the Obama Administration. I think the only other time that happened was when we switched administrations from Clinton to Bush in 2000. This year we have them back and we're real happy about that because it will, you know it will enhance the analysis. 

[ Jeremy Cluchey: ] Can you talk a little bit about some of the major programs that were cancelled this year? 

[ Mike Sullivan: ] This year Secretary Gates, back in April of this year, showed a lot of leadership, we thought, and came out and tried to get a handle on some of the costs in the current portfolio.  So in April of this year he recommended, for example, that the VH71 Presidential helicopter program be terminated, the future combat systems. Some people think of it as being terminated or restructured, if you will but that was, he looked at that and said we don't need all this capability now. Let's kind of decentralize what's going on there. The transformational satellite program was terminated. One of our missile defense agency programs, the ballistic missile defense, was terminated because they were having too much trouble with the program. And finally there was a combat search and rescue helicopter that the Air Force was trying to get started, that he pushed back. So that basically covers all of the terminations and it was quite a bit of money that went with that. 

[ Jeremy Cluchey: ] Yet despite these terminations, GAO found that DOD's portfolio of major defense acquisition programs grew from last year. What explains that growth? 

[ Mike Sullivan: ] Well every year the portfolio, we track the changes, there's comings and goings, just like anything else. If you think of a stock portfolio, for example, where you might sell some stocks and you might buy new ones. That's what's going on there. There are new programs that start up and there are old programs that either exit the portfolio because they're completed or as we just discussed, because they've been terminated. So this year with the programs that were terminated or exited, for example the C17 airlifter, the F22 fighter, and a navy ship, were completed and exited the portfolio. Somewhere around 18 programs entered the portfolio so the net increase was 6. 

[ Narrator: ] To learn more, visit GAO's Web site at gao.gov, and be sure to tune in to the next edition of GAO's Watchdog Report for more from the congressional watchdog, the Government Accountability Office.

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