Courthouse Construction

The General Services Administration, together with the federal judiciary, has embarked on a $10 billion courthouse construction initiative to address the urgent housing needs of the federal judiciary, which include more space and greater security. One of the major criticisms of this initiative has been the lack of a long-term strategic plan that identifies and prioritizes the judiciary's most urgently needed courthouse construction projects, helps Congress compare the merits of project proposals and priorities, and provides a rationale for allocating resources to the most urgently needed projects. In March 1996, the judiciary issued a courthouse construction plan that identifies the projects it proposes be funded through fiscal year 2001. This report assesses whether the 5-year plan (1) reflects the judiciary's most urgent courthouse construction needs and (2) provides the information needed by decisionmakers on the relative merit of the projects.

GAO found that: (1) while the judiciary has developed a methodology for assessing project urgency and a 5-year construction plan to communicate its urgent courthouse construction needs, GAO's analysis suggests that the 5-year plan does not reflect all of the judiciary's most urgent courthouse construction needs; (2) in preparing the 5-year plan, the judiciary developed urgency scores for 45 projects; (3) it did not develop urgency scores for other locations that according to AOC also need new courthouses; (4) GAO's analysis of available data on conditions at the 80 other locations showed that 30 of them likely would receive an urgency score higher than some projects in the plan; (5) for projects that are in the plan, high urgency scores did not always lead to high funding priority; (6) AOC officials said that this was a transitional plan in that it placed heavy emphasis in assigning funding priorities on the projects already in the GSA pipeline rather than solely on project urgency; (7) GAO's work also showed that the judiciary's plan and related material do not present competing projects in a long-term strategic context or articulate a rationale or justification for proposed projects and their relative priority; (8) they do not contain project-specific information on the conditions that exist at each location that would help decisionmakers compare the merits of individual projects, better understand the rationale for funding priorities, and justify funding decisions; and (9) GAO recognizes that the plan is transitional and that it is reasonable for pipeline projects to receive priority consideration for funding, but the plan and related material should make a convincing argument as to why they should be funded before others that have higher urgency scores.

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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