Defense bill boosts missile scrutiny

June 10, 2010 at 2:07 pm | Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

by Sara M. Langston with the blog faculty

Source: Politico

As Congress, prodded by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, casts a more watchful eye on Pentagon spending and contracting procedures, even missile defense programs may no longer get a free pass. In fact, come next year, Congress may boost scrutiny of the Pentagon’s missile defense initiatives in a way both political parties can support.

In the defense authorization bill, the Senate Armed Services Committee has included two new provisions — one to increase oversight of the entire agency and another focused on a key program that Republicans want to ensure remains viable.

The first requires the Missile Defense Agency to start laying down a “baseline,” or an initial figure, for how much each of its programs should cost. It’s something lawmakers and the Government Accountability Office have sought for years — and that taxpayers might be surprised doesn’t already exist.

“Creating objective assessments of the costs and progress of the missile defense program brings MDA closer in line with other defense acquisition programs,” said Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), who leads the Strategic Forces Subcommittee. “It adds accountability [and] transparency and improves efficiency, which is good for the missile defense program and good for taxpayers.”

The agency is no small backwater. The MDA manages the research, development and testing of all the nation’s missile defense systems, commanding an annual budget of roughly $10 billion. The agency asked for $8.4 billion next year, up several hundred million dollars over 2010, but it may have even more to spend. The Senate Armed Services Committee passed a defense authorization bill that will allow the agency to spend $10.2 billion, and the House voted for $10.3 billion.

The agency oversees everything from the colossal Ground-based Midcourse Defense System — giant interceptors buried in Alaska and California designed to pick off enemy intercontinental ballistic missiles — to the administration’s new phased, adaptive approach to defending Europe, first from sea-based interceptors and later from land and high-tech projects that remain the subject of research.

The agency, created by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in 2002 as a successor to the Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative and the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, was initially a research and development entity, a move that shielded it from the acquisition rules that apply to most defense weapons programs. And for most of the Bush administration, the MDA enjoyed a light touch when it came to oversight. When a program’s cost grew, for example, the agency just asked for more money for the program the next year, said one congressional aide.

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, described the problem during a 2009 speech at a missile defense conference — at a time when the administration was focused on reining in Pentagon programs in which cost growth had escalated by nearly $300 billion.

“For the last eight years, MDA programs have been exempt from many of the most basic requirements of the DoD acquisition system,” Levin said. “MDA programs have suffered from extensive schedule delays and from billions of dollars of added costs. Unfortunately, we have not been in a position to say how bad these problems are because, unlike other acquisition programs, MDA programs are not required to establish firm baselines for cost and schedule, not required to measure their performance against those baselines and not subject to Nunn-McCurdy requirements to identify and address troubled programs.”