FAA Has Not Gone Far Enough With Improvements to Its Planning and Acquisition Processes

In 1977, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) advised a congressional subcommittee that FAA was well into the process of comprehensively overhauling its acquisition management process. Directives for planning and system acquisition management processes were being implemented and a high-level management panel, the System Requirements Group (SRG), had been established to monitor the acquisition process. These actions were taken to correct deficiencies in the FAA agencywide planning and system acquisition management processes. A GAO review of this process included: (1) an evaluation of the directives developed to support the FAA agencywide planning and the System Acquisition Management (SAM) process; (2) an evaluation of the SRG activities in monitoring major system programs under the acquisition process; and (3) a review of various major programs to determine what impact the revised acquisition process had on their management.