The Department of Defense (DoD) will not provide Congress with a complete annual Selected Acquisition Report (SAR) on major acquisition programs this year. According to Inside the Pentagon, “Instead of an annual report summarizing the acquisition program costs, schedules and performance changes for approximately 100 big-ticket programs, Ashton Carter--the Pentagon's acquisition executive--on July 6 sent lawmakers an explanation for cost growth in a single program only, the Marine Corps' H-1 helicopter upgrade.”
The annual SAR is indispensable to proper oversight of major defense acquisitions and is used to determine if a program's costs have exceeded so-called “Nunn-McCurdy” thresholds. The Nunn-McCurdy Amendment, which was first introduced in the 1982 National Defense Authorization Act and made permanent by Congress the next year, requires Congress to be notified when a program exceeds cost estimates by 15% and mandates that a program be restructured or terminated when its price grows to 25% over the original estimate.
POGO Executive Director Danielle Brian explained the importance of SARs in a 2004 letter:
The SARs, which provide cost, schedule and performance information on major weapons programs, have historically been a cornerstone for the monitoring of weapons systems by Congress, the media, and groups like POGO. Their elimination would deal a serious blow against open government. For instance, the latest round of SARs revealed a disturbing story of out-of-control weapons systems unit cost escalation for programs ranging from the F/A-22 tactical fighter to the Comanche helicopter. This important information could have been kept out of the public debate were it not for the SARs.
DoD is legally required to provide a comprehensive annual SAR with 60 days after submission of the President's budget proposal to Congress and to submit quarterly SARs that are relatively limited in scope. However, the law contains enough ambiguity and exemptions that this year's remarkably brief report probably satisfies legal requirements. The Inside the Pentagon article explains that “Pentagon officials justified this omission in May by arguing that the compressed fiscal year 2010 budget review this spring did not permit time to prepare detailed funding projections for FY-11 to FY-15, arguing that those funding plans were going to be dramatically revised this summer as part of the Quadrennial Defense Review.” However, the piece also mentions that the Department of Defense's actions are not unprecedented; no SAR was provided to Congress in the first year of George W. Bush's administration.
-- John Cappel
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