Environmental Compliance

Guidance Needed in Programming Defense Construction Projects Gao ID: NSIAD-94-22 November 26, 1993

The Pentagon plans to spend billions of dollars during the next few years to ensure that its facilities comply with environmental laws and regulations. The Conference Report for the Defense Department's (DOD) fiscal year 1993 military construction appropriation expressed concern that the Air Force's fiscal year 1993 budget request for environmental projects in the military construction appropriation was about twice as large as those of the other services combined. This report reviews the (1) future funding requirements for DOD environmental compliance and (2) differences in how the services identify, classify, and fund environmental compliance projects.

GAO found that: (1) although DOD believes its annual cost for environmental compliance will decline, but these costs could be higher than current DOD estimates; (2) DOD compliance costs are unpredictable and will probably increase due to more stringent environmental requirements; (3) a large portion of DOD future costs will result from unmet current environmental requirements; (4) the services use inconsistent processes for identifying, classifying, and funding environmental projects; (5) the services have not effectively implemented their environmental compliance assessment programs; (6) DOD cannot reliably measure its environmental investment costs because the services use different appropriations to fund similar environmental projects; (7) most of DOD project funding is not subject to detailed project-level review; (8) more consistent processes for classifying and funding DOD environmental projects would help to ensure that environmental compliance costs are properly identified and prioritized and give DOD and Congress a basis for making funding trade-offs and preventing funding inequities; and (9) the services are developing approaches to ensure that their compliance needs are identified and addressed, but DOD needs to provide more comprehensive guidance to the services on project classification, project reporting, and funding methods.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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