Naval Ship Donation

Last year, the Navy announced that it planned to donate the USS Missouri, the historic battleship that was the scene of the Japanese surrender ending World War II, to a memorial site at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Five applicants in different parts of the country had competed to receive the USS Missouri. This report provides information on the (1) process of applying for the ship, (2) criteria and weighting used to evaluate the applications, and (3) use of the criteria and weighting in the selection process. GAO also recommends ways to improve the process for future ship donations.

GAO noted that: (1) the Navy began the donation process for the U.S.S. Missouri in the same manner as prior donations, by requesting financial and technical information from the applicants and working with applicants to help ensure that their applications would satisfy the Navy's financial and technical requirements; (2) subsequently, the Navy decided that, with respect to the U.S.S. Missouri, additional evaluation criteria, "historical significance" and "public affairs benefits to the Navy," were needed to assist the Secretary of the Navy in making the donation decision among four of five applicants that met the Navy's financial and technical requirements; (3) this was the first time such additional criteria were used in any donation selection process; (4) while the donation process appears to have been impartially applied, and all applicants were provided the same information on the additional criteria at the same time, the Navy did not do a good job in communicating its additional requirements to the applicants; (5) specifically, applicants were not told: (a) what the relative importance of the evaluation criteria was in the process (the added criteria actually represented 75 percent of the donation award weight); (b) what the added evaluation criteria meant; or (c) how well already submitted applications met the added criteria; (6) these factors were particularly important because the Navy's evaluation teams were told to base their scoring only on the information contained in the applications; (7) as a result, the Navy evaluation teams found that the applications had limited information that could be applied against the added criteria; (8) according to some applicants, had they known that the additional criteria carried so much weight, they would have revised their applications; (9) what appears to have been an otherwise open process with clear communications and frequent interaction between the Navy and the applicants for the U.S.S. Missouri was not with respect to the additional two criteria; (10) the Secretary of the Navy, by statute, has broad discretion in making ship donation decisions; (11) the Navy's existing donation application procedures are designed for assessing applicants in terms of their financial and technical capabilities to move and sustain a vessel; and (12) when additional criteria beyond financial and technical requirements are used and applicants are asked to submit information to address them, existing application procedures do not provide guidance on how the Navy should proceed.

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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