NASA Infrastructure

Despite some progress in reducing its infrastructure, NASA faces formidable challenges to successfully reaching its budget goals through fiscal year 2000. Ultimately, if NASA cannot find enough infrastructure cost reductions to meet these goals, the agency will likely have to once again adjust its programs--stretching out, reducing the scope, terminating current efforts, and postponing new initiatives. Even with NASA management's commitment to meeting goals without making such changes, the environment confronting the agency will not allow it to readily overcome the many obstacles it faces. GAO believes that NASA should submit a plan to Congress on how it will meet the fiscal year 2000 infrastructure targets. On the basis of that plan and any further progress by NASA, Congress could consider establishing an independent process to facilitate closure and consolidation of NASA facilities. GAO summarized this report in testimony before Congress; see: NASA Facilities: Challenges to Achieving Reductions and Efficiencies, by Thomas J. Schulz, Associate Director for Defense Acquisitions Issues, before the Subcommittee on National Security, International Affairs, and Criminal Justice, House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight. GAO/T-NSIAD-96-238, Sept. 11 (six pages).

GAO found that: (1) NASA plans for a $2.8-billion reduction in the current replacement value of its facilities will yield only about $250 million in cost reductions through fiscal year (FY) 2000; (2) NASA has experienced problems in assessing cost-reduction opportunities because it did not thoroughly evaluate cost-reduction options, excluded many systems in its review of ways to cut supercomputer costs, performed questionable initial studies for aircraft consolidation, made inappropriate closure recommendations, and overstated cost-reduction estimates; (3) although environmental cleanup costs could affect facility disposition efforts, NASA lacks a policy for identifying other responsible parties and sharing cleanup costs; (4) a joint effort between NASA and the Department of Defense to study potential operation cost reductions through increased cooperation and sharing yielded no specific recommendations for closures, consolidations, or cost reductions but did identify barriers to sharing and increasing interagency reliance; and (5) NASA ability to reach its workforce reduction goal by 2000 is subject to some major uncertainties, and NASA may need to plan a reduction in force if enough employees do not retire or resign voluntarily.

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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