Trends in Nunn-McCurdy Cost Breaches for Major Defense Acquisition Programs

For nearly 30 years, the statutory provision, known as Nunn-McCurdy, has been an oversight tool for Congress to hold the Department of Defense (DOD) accountable for cost growth on major defense programs. A Nunn-McCurdy breach occurs when a program's unit cost exceeds certain thresholds. When that happens, DOD must notify Congress of the breach. There are a number of statutory provisions that help implement cost growth reporting under Nunn-McCurdy. For the purposes of this report, we refer to these statutory provisions as the Nunn-McCurdy process. In September 2010, Congress requested that we examine trends in Nunn-McCurdy breaches and factors that may be responsible for these trends. In this report, we also discuss changes DOD is making or proposing to make to the Nunn-McCurdy process. To identify trends in Nunn-McCurdy breaches, we collected and analyzed existing data on breaches from DOD's Defense Acquisition Management Information Retrieval system, which contains data on breaches since 1997. DOD officials also provided us with a list of programs that breached the cost growth thresholds since 1997, which we analyzed to remove duplicate entries. In addition, we reviewed analyses by the Office of the Director of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation to verify our data.