Navy Steaming Days

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO examined Navy ships' steaming activities to determine whether program execution matched its budget justification to Congress.

GAO found that the Navy: (1) expressed its ship operation requirements in terms of operating tempo goals representing the percentage of time each calendar quarter that ships were involved in readiness training, exercises, and operations; (2) averaged 50.5 and 29 steaming days each quarter for deployed and nondeployed fleets, respectively, in fiscal year (FY) 1987; (3) funded ship operations through the general purposes forces budget activity of its operations and maintenance appropriation account; (4) identified, in its congressional budget submission, total requested amounts for the general purposes forces activity and for each activity category, including ship operations; (5) had authority to move funds among the various categories within the general purposes forces activity without informing Congress; (6) primarily based its FY 1987 request for $1.65 billion to fund direct ship operating costs on prior FY costs; (7) did not link budgeted requirements and operational expenditures to measures of readiness achievement, and lacked readily measurable mission-related performance objectives describing its expected achievements; and (8) in response to congressional direction, provided some additional data in its FY 1990 budget request and also developed several initiatives to relate steaming day expenditures to readiness.