Additional Cost Transparency and Design Criteria Needed for National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Projects
Highlights
GAO published its third annual assessment of selected large-scale NASA projects. During this assessment we identified several issues that merit NASA's management attention. The federal government faces real fiscal limitations and will have to make difficult choices about upcoming priorities. This reality makes it more important than ever that NASA manage its programs and projects as efficiently and effectively as possible and within a budget that over recent years has remained relatively constant. It will also require that NASA make tough decisions about which projects to fund among core missions in science, aeronautics, and human space flight and exploration. Our work over the past three years has shown that NASA's major projects are frequently approved without evidence of a sound business case--ensuring a match between requirements and resources--and, therefore, cost more and take longer to develop than planned. Our March 2011 assessment found that 13 NASA projects that established baselines prior to fiscal year 2009 had experienced an average cost growth of almost 55 percent, with a combined increase in development costs of almost $2.5 billion from their baselines established at their Confirmation Review. While NASA has taken steps over recent years to help improve its acquisition management through several initiatives aimed at improving cost estimating and management oversight, the overall outcomes of these efforts will take time to become apparent. Based on the findings of our past three assessments, we are recommending that NASA (1) provide increased transparency into project costs to the Congress to conduct oversight and ensure earlier accountability and (2) develop a common set of measurable and proven criteria to assess the design stability of projects before proceeding into later phases of development.
Recommendations
Recommendations for Executive Action
| Agency Affected | Recommendation | Status |
|---|---|---|
| National Aeronautics and Space Administration | To provide increased transparency into project risks, the NASA Administrator should direct the Office of the Chief Financial Officer (OCFO) to provide more transparency into project costs in the early, critical phases of development so that the Congress has sufficient information to conduct oversight and ensure earlier accountability. Specifically, the OCFO should provide progress reports for NASA space flight programs and projects in formulation that include information on cumulative prior budget authority and current cost ranges in NASA's annual budget submission to the Congress to enhance the knowledge with which they base funding decisions for NASA. |
In response to this recommendation, NASA added prior year costs and estimated life cycle cost ranges for projects in early phases of development in the FY 2013 President's Budget Request.
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| National Aeronautics and Space Administration | To provide NASA decision-makers with a mechanism to consistently and accurately judge design stability, the NASA Administrator should direct the Office of the Chief Engineer to develop a common set of measurable and proven criteria, such as the percentage of releasable design drawings, to assess design stability and to allow decision-makers to make more informed, consistent determinations of approval for projects to proceed from the final design phase to the assembly, integration, and test phase of the development process and amend NASA's systems engineering policy, accordingly. |
In providing comments on this report, NASA concurred with this recommendation. NASA has accordingly updated its project management policy (NASA policy requirement 7210.5E) and its systems engineering policy (NASA policy requirement 7123.1B) to require projects to track three design metrics -- mass margins, power margins, and request for action closures. Experts we met with in the space community also identified mass and power margins as useful to assess the design stability of unique space systems. During our 2014 and 2015 reviews of large-scale NASA projects, we found that nearly all of the projects were tracking mass and power margins and utilizing those metrics as an indicator of the project's design stability.
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