FAA Has Not Gone Far Enough With Improvements to Its Planning and Acquisition Processes

In 1977, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) advised a congressional subcommittee that FAA was well into the process of comprehensively overhauling its acquisition management process. Directives for planning and system acquisition management processes were being implemented and a high-level management panel, the System Requirements Group (SRG), had been established to monitor the acquisition process. These actions were taken to correct deficiencies in the FAA agencywide planning and system acquisition management processes. A GAO review of this process included: (1) an evaluation of the directives developed to support the FAA agencywide planning and the System Acquisition Management (SAM) process; (2) an evaluation of the SRG activities in monitoring major system programs under the acquisition process; and (3) a review of various major programs to determine what impact the revised acquisition process had on their management.

The review showed that while the concepts set forth in the directives were sound and represented an improvement over the previous situation, the agencywide planning directive was not fully implemented and the acquisition directive did not provide sufficient guidance and needed to be revised. It also was found that: (1) The policy, mission analysis, long-range planning, and program performance and evaluation areas had not been implemented. (2) The FAA system acquisition management directive was not always followed and did not conform to either the Department of Transportation's (DOT) acquisition directives or the Office of Management and Budget's (OMB) Circular A-109. (3) The FAA management concept limited the role of the program manager. (4) The SRG has been ineffective because of its exclusion from such significant functions as planning. (5) The SRG has no written charter identifying responsibilities, authority, and tenure of office. (6) The requirements set forth in the OMB Circular continued to be rejected by DOT and FAA. FAA and DOT internal reports showed that the same deficiencies continued to exist. Without an agencywide comprehensive planning process and a sound system acquisition management process, the validity of the FAA budgetary process can be questioned, including how effectively it uses resources.

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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