Military Infrastructure

The long-standing absence of data with which to make funding decisions and rising backlogs in infrastructure repairs have raised concerns in Congress about the Defense Department's (DOD) management and maintenance of its properties. This review of real property maintenance management focuses on the properties that the military maintains and repairs using funds from DOD's operation and maintenance account. GAO (1) analyzes how the services determine and prioritize maintenance and repair requirements and how they allocate resources to meet their needs, (2) identifies promising practices in facility management that the services could consider, and (3) identifies barriers to implementing these practices and ways to address them.

GAO noted that: (1) DOD does not have a comprehensive strategy for maintaining the services' infrastructure; (2) rather, each service sets its own standards for maintaining infrastructure; (3) as a result, the services differ in the way they rate property conditions, prioritize repairs, and allocate resources; (4) the service headquarters cannot be certain that the most critical properties in need of maintenance and repair are targeted; (5) given incomplete and inconsistent data, and different real property maintenance (RPM) rating systems among the services, Congress cannot be assured that it is funding maintenance and repairs that will provide the best return on its investment; (6) there is little relationship between identified RPM needs and the funds the services allocate for RPM; (7) none of the services' RPM spending plans provide sufficient funding to keep their total backlog of repairs at current levels; (8) although DOD instructed the services in July 1997 to fund RPM to enable them to meet 75 percent of their RPM requirements by 2003, DOD removed that goal from an update guidance in April 1999; (9) because the services' headquarters consistently underfund requirements, base and command officials request funding to cover only a portion of RPM needs; (10) for fiscal year 1997, major commands GAO surveyed reported they requested funding to cover an average of about one-fifth of the RPM needs of their bases and bases reported receiving funding equal to only about one-sixth of their needs; (11) many promising practices exist in the RPM area, including: (a) establishing a single system for counting and categorizing inventory; (b) having a single, valid engineering-based system for assessing facility conditions, with adequately trained personnel and multiple levels of review; (c) prioritizing budget allocations based on physical condition, relevance of facilities to the mission, and life-cycle costing and budgeting; (d) setting up a single property maintenance budget that is controlled by a central office with the power to shift resources to facilities in the greatest need; (e) creating incentives to demolish or vacate excess space; (f) restricting the use of RPM funds for other maintenance purposes; and (g) charging an annual maintenance fee, based on square feet used, to ensure adequate funding for facilities and to create an incentive for space conservation; and (12) none of the military services has implemented all the promising practices for RPM, and their adoption of these practices is hampered by several barriers.

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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