Motor Vehicles

Better Management of the Military Services' Vehicles Could Save Millions Gao ID: NSIAD-91-132 May 24, 1991

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the military services' management of their nontactical transportation, focusing on the: (1) potential for reducing the cost of motor vehicles used by the military services; (2) completion of statutorily required cost analyses comparing the services' costs with General Services Administration (GSA) and private contractors' costs; (3) vehicle utilization; and (4) special purchase requirements for military vehicles.

GAO found that: (1) the Army estimated that the annual reduction of motor vehicle costs, due to consolidating its U.S. motor fleet with GSA vehicles, would range from about $25 million to $52 million; (2) military service conversion from service-owned motor vehicle fleets to GSA fleets would ensure more effective and efficient motor vehicle management; (3) the Air Force was considering converting approximately 40,000 vehicles to GSA, which represented almost all of its candidate vehicles; (4) the Navy and Marine Corps had not performed cost analyses comparing their motor vehicle costs with the cost of relying on GSA for motor vehicle needs; (5) using the Army's cost reduction estimates, potential savings for the services' U.S. fleets could range from $60 million to $123 million annually; (6) mileage statistics and audit reports indicated that some Department of Defense (DOD) installations had more vehicles than needed and were not using vehicles effectively, causing the services to incur excess costs for vehicle procurement, operations, and maintenance; (7) due to special vehicle purchase requirements, the services often paid more than other federal agencies for similar motor vehicles; and (8) due to financing concerns and Office of Management and Budget prohibitions on the transfer of personnel positions to support fleet management of added vehicles, GSA suspended consolidation of the Army fleet and could not consolidate other fleets.

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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