Military Base Realignments and Closures: The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's Technology Center Construction Project
What GAO Found
NGA modified the original scope of work for the Technology Center but met the original data-storage requirement. DOD has limited written guidance on what constitutes a complete and usable facility. However, NGA, Office of the Secretary of Defense, and Army officials believe the Technology Center constitutes a complete and usable facility because it meets its intended purpose of creating 10 petabytes of data storage to replace the data-storage capabilities at the sites that were closed by the implementation of BRAC Recommendation 168. Although the construction of NGAs new Technology Center was planned as part of the implementation of a BRAC recommendation to consolidate various NGA satellite locations at a new NGA facility, advances in data-storage technology led NGA to revise downward the space in the Technology Center that it would need to fit out to accommodate its data-storage needs. NGA also increased the electrical density in the new facility, even though the amount of space was reduced. As a result, NGA modified the original scope of work for the center during the course of the BRAC construction project, and one of the two floors of the new building originally planned for data storage was not fitted out. NGA officials told us that they believed completing both floors would have provided more data-storage capability than their identified requirements called for and therefore would have gone beyond the intent of the BRAC recommendation to consolidate existing capability. The original documentation of the requirements for the NGA construction project lacked some details such as the identification of the Technology Center as a primary or supporting facility, and there was a lack of clarity regarding which DOD organization should be responsible for oversight of this project. As a result, the original decision to change the scope of the project by not fitting out the third floor of the Technology Center was not communicated to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, to the projects business managerthe Department of the Armyor to Congress. Therefore they were unable to participate in that decision. NGA did provide these officials with information regarding the decision at a later date.