Depot Maintenance

Some Funds Intended for Maintenance Are Used for Other Purposes Gao ID: NSIAD-95-124 July 6, 1995

During the past several years, Congress and military officials have expressed concern about the adequacy of the depot maintenance funding levels and the adverse effect on readiness resulting from growing maintenance backlogs. This report (1) determine the services' processes for deciding which end items of equipment will be overhauled, (2) compares the depot maintenance funding received by the military services from Congress to the amounts request by the services and to the use of these funds, and (3) assesses the services' management of maintenance backlogs and the impact of depot maintenance backlogs on readiness.

GAO found that: (1) the services use the same general process to identify end items for depot maintenance and to determine their maintenance budget requests, which includes hours of usage/operations, mileage, engineered standards, historical data, inspection results, the depots' ability to handle the maintenance, and funding availability; (2) the Army and Navy use an inspection process to determine whether equipment overhauls are needed, which significantly reduces their maintenance costs; (3) from fiscal year (FY) 1993 through FY 1995, the Army and Navy received about $591 million more and the Air Force about $75 million less than they requested for depot maintenance; (4) from FY 1993 through FY 1994, the services completed about $485 million less of depot maintenance work than the amount requested and about $832 million less than the amount received; (5) the services diverted depot maintenance funds to military contingencies and other operation and maintenance expenditures to replace budget reductions in other accounts; (6) depot maintenance backlogs that exist at the time of budget requests tend to decrease during the year of budget execution mainly due to the services' reducing the requirements for items needing depot maintenance; and (7) the services believe that depot maintenance backlogs are manageable and have not adversely affected operational readiness due to depot funding and execution levels and the surplus of equipment generated through force reductions.

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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