Environmental Cleanup

Members of Congress have raised concerns about how the military's initiatives to better target environmental cleanup funds have been affected by the availability of funds. GAO found that the Defense Department ( DOD) uses its planning, programming, and budgeting process to make funding decisions, and DOD components ultimately make site-specific decisions. When DOD received less money than requested or rescissions occurred, Environmental Security provided written or oral guidance for DOD components' actions. Cleanup schedule delays occurred at installations when the funding received was more or less than planned. Reports of cleanup schedule and other impacts varied according to individual project circumstances and were not clearly linked to installation planned and allocated funding levels.

GAO noted that: (1) DOD develops and allocates approved budgets through its departmentwide planning, programming, and budget process; (2) the components used DOD guidance to establish priorities and distribute funds to the various installations, but the impact of that guidance is not necessarily traceable to specific installations or sites; (3) during fiscal years (FY) 1993 to 1997, Congress took three actions that significantly affected funding for DOD cleanup activities; (4) in FY 1995, Congress appropriated $400 million less than DOD requested and then rescinded an additional $300 million of the amount appropriated; (5) Congress appropriated $200 million less than DOD had requested for FY 1996; (6) in each case, DOD components adjusted funding priorities in light of the congressional actions and DOD guidance; (7) while specific guidance varied, both written and verbal guidance encouraged priority for sites of high risk and discouraged cleanup studies that were not essential; (8) data contained in DOD's annual reports to Congress and in DOD components' records do not show a direct relationship between installations receiving less or more funding than planned and those reporting cleanup schedule delays due to funding; (9) for example, during FY 1995 and FY 1996, about half of the Army installations with the largest decreases in funding reported cleanup schedule delays--a frequency similar to Army installations with the largest increases in funding; (10) during this period, GAO also found that actual funding changes under the DOD process often varied from that initially envisioned because of such reasons as inherent uncertainty during cleanup planning; and (11) for example, DOD initially identified a potential decrease in funding for two sites at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, whereas the Army allocated a slight overall funding increase to that installation, which has 205 cleanup sites.