A new report from the General Accountability Office offers the U.S. Department of Homeland Security guidance on how to increase the department’s transparency in its acquisition goals.
As part of the DHS Appropriations Act of 2015, the GAO is required to review DHS’s major acquisitions on an ongoing basis. This year, DHS plans to spend more than $41 billion to acquire system for its current portfolio of major acquisition programs. The GAO’s review of the programs looked at whether major programs are meeting cost and schedule goals, the status of cost or schedule risks, and the opportunities for improvement.
The review found that several programs revised their baselines without clearly documenting the reasons for the revisions in the baseline document. While DHS guidance said tracking the causes of revisions is important, it doesn’t specify the types of things that can result in revisions, such as a change in requirements. The GAO also said more than half of Homeland Security’s 24 major programs face cost or schedule risks.
“All but one of the 17 DHS major acquisition programs with DHS-approved baselines that GAO analyzed are meeting their current cost and schedule goals; however, nearly all of the programs had revised their goals at least once, with seven having revised their goals three or more times,” the report said. “These goals are set in their acquisition program baselines—the agreement between programs and decisionmakers about an acquisition’s cost and when its capabilities will be delivered. Revisions can reflect increased costs, changes in capabilities, or result in new milestone dates. For instance, since these 17 programs initially set their cost goals, the goals have increased from a total of $33.1 billion to $41.3 billion.”
According to the GAO, DHS should update its guidance to specify when it makes changes to acquisition programs and to specify the types of change drivers that major acquisition program document when revising them. The GAO said DHS agreed with the report’s findings.
Two Coast Guard programs comprised more than a third of DHS’s estimated acquisition costs – Polar Security Cutter and Offshore Patrol Cutter – and are likely to drive cost growth in Fiscal Year 2025. And 15 program face potential delays, the report said, including multiple Coast Guard and Customs and Border Protection programs.
The GAO said that since 2014, it has made 220 acquisition and major acquisition policy recommendations to DHS, but that the agency has yet to address about 50 of them.