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Military Infrastructure: Real Property Management Needs Improvement

NSIAD-99-100 Published: Sep 07, 1999. Publicly Released: Sep 07, 1999.
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Highlights

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Department of Defense's (DOD) management of the maintenance of its real properties, focusing on: (1) how the services determine and prioritize maintenance and repair requirements and how they allocate resources to meet their needs; (2) promising practices in facility management that the services could consider; and (3) barriers to implementing promising practices and ways to address them.

Recommendations

Recommendations for Executive Action

Agency Affected Recommendation Status
Department of Defense To improve DOD's RPM management and address barriers to change, the Secretary of Defense should fund the development of DOD's strategic facilities plan.
Closed – Implemented
The Department of Defense has implemented the recommendation.
Department of Defense To improve DOD's RPM management and address barriers to change, the Secretary of Defense should fund the development of DOD's strategic facilities plan and develop a cross-service integrated strategy, in close coordination and consultation with the heads of facilities infrastructure of each service, to comprehensively address RPM issues. The strategy should provide, at a minimum, for: (1) uniform standards that set the minimum condition in which military facilities are to be maintained and standardized condition assessment criteria; (2) standard criteria by which the services are to allocate space for different types of facilities (e.g., barracks, classrooms, administrative buildings) and against which RPM funding allocations will be measured; (3) standard criteria for inventorying DOD and service property (except for relatively few service-unique facilities; (4) computerized, on-line inventory and cost databases that permit meaningful comparisons, across and within the services, of RPM spending by type, size, and location of facility and RPM activity, including direct data access by the Office of the Secretary of Defense; (5) standard cost accounting methods by which the services will record and track their RPM expenditures so that they and DOD know how much is being spent, where it is being spent, and on what type of facility or RPM-activity it is being spent, by common metric, using the Army's Directorate of Public Works' Annual Summary of Operations report (published through 1997) as a potential model; (6) the identification of priorities for the services to use to explicitly link needs assessments with resource allocations and tracking systems that show whether or not identified high priority needs are allocated the funds intended for them by Congress; (7) mandated training standards (curriculum and hours) for all those involved in condition assessment and ratings of repair urgency; and (8) the services' adoption of a comprehensive, valid, engineering-based assessment system that incorporates life-cycle planning into facilities maintenance based on the well-developed methods already used by nonmilitary entities.
Closed – Implemented
DOD has largely implemented all the key elements of the recommendation since late 1999. It has established a uniform, standardized Installation Readiness report (IIR) condition assessment system, requiring the services to report on the impact of the condition of their facilities using the 4-tier system. It has also transformed the way in which RPM funds are tracked, creating two accounts, one for sustainment and the other for military construction (recapitalization). DOD has essentially adopted a life-cycle method of cost calculation of RPM costs, using the metric of recapitalization and a baseline of achieving a 67-year lifecycle average for infrastructure. Therefore, the recommendation has essentially been fully implemented.
Department of Defense The Department's RPM strategy needs to deal with the issue of funding instability, particularly the migration of RPM funds to non-RPM uses and the lack of RPM reserve funds. In this regard, the Department should consider the feasibility of adopting the promising practices identified in this report. To the extent that adoption of any of these practices would require changes to existing law, the Department should develop a legislative proposal for submission to Congress.
Closed – Implemented
DOD has changed the way it budgets RPM, separating the RPM budget into sustainment/renovation/modernization costs v. military construction costs, and requiring the services do to the same. This has had the intended effects of both permitting careful tracking of expenditures for infrastructure, as well as making it considerably more difficult to migrate funds from one account into another. This was also made difficult by setting a benchmark that the services must fund sustainment at 100% of the calculated requirement (based on square footage and type/location of facility), thereby making it possible to identify any shortfalls. This has proved largely successful.

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Topics

Facility maintenanceFacility repairsFederal property managementFunds managementMaintenance costsMilitary budgetsMilitary facilitiesPrivate sector practicesU.S. ArmyReal property