Most DoD joint bases stumbling on facility sustainment, raising flags for readiness and accountability

Guest:	Alissa Czyz
Title:	GAO Director of Defense Capabilities and Management
Summary:	The Defense Department’s joint bases were created to improve efficiency and readiness, but sustaining those facilities has proven uneven. A new GAO report finds most joint bases are funded below sustainment goals, with limited visibility into how resources are allocated and lingering disputes over who pays for what. We're walking through the findings and what they mean for readiness.

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Interview transcript:

Terry Gerton I want to talk about joint military bases. Back in 2009 and ’10, DoD consolidated 26 military installations into 12 joint bases. And the hypothesis was that this would increase readiness, reduce duplication and save costs. GAO’s got a new report out looking at this process and the program. What did you find? Do the actual results support the hypothesis?

Alissa Czyz  DoD did consolidate 26 installations into 12 joint bases over a decade ago, exactly right, to try to achieve efficiencies and cost savings. Our report shows that the joint bases have a number of challenges, particularly when it comes to funding facilities and installations on those joint bases.

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Terry Gerton The idea with a joint base was that one military service would be in charge and the rest would be supported, so a supporting-supported relationship, but you found that 11 of those 12 bases received less funding than DoD’s facilities sustainment goal over all of this time. And what does that shortfall mean on the ground for base operations and mission support?

Alissa Czyz Yes, so DoD has a goal to fund at least 90% of its requirements for facilities sustainment across its installations. We found at the 12 joint bases, the average funding level was about 57% across those 12 bases over a five-year period. So that’s significantly lower than DoD’s funding goal. And unfortunately, as a result, we saw numerous instances where facilities were not kept up in good working order. We saw deteriorating buildings; we saw HVAC systems that were not working, that were housing sensitive weapons systems and other equipment — that’s very important for the mission of the services. We saw instances where buildings had to be abandoned and not used at all, leaking pipes. It sort of ran the course of many different challenges, you know, due to lack of funding.

Terry Gerton We have heard persistent stories about lack of maintenance in military barracks and military family housing. Is that captured in this set of underfunding?

Alissa Czyz Yes, and GAO has reported extensively on the barracks and on housing issues and underfunding those. Ironically, we point out in this report that the Army, for instance, has devoted a lot of funding to kind of shore up its barracks, and that is taking away funds from other facilities on installations, too. So that was a challenge we found in this report, but absolutely the same issue applies to housing.

Terry Gerton So it’s both living spaces and operational spaces that are suffering. But the next point you make is that DoD lacks reliable data on how facility funding is distributed between the supported services and the supporting services. Explain why, after all of this time, they still can’t get a handle on who’s funding how much on each installation.

Alissa Czyz Yes, so having good information is the first step to solve a problem, but unfortunately for the joint bases, DoD was not collecting data on how funds were distributed between sort of that lead service who has responsibility for most of the sustainment of facilities and the supporting services. They only had one large number that rolled up the entire base, so you really couldn’t look at how much, though, each service was getting and whether one was being underfunded more significantly than the other on the base. We did make a recommendation that DoD needs to collect this data so they first have good information about how money is being spent and allocated on the bases, and then can take some steps to address any issues. When we surveyed base commanders — and we did a survey of all 12 joint bases for this review, we surveyed command leadership — we consistently heard that the supported services felt like their needs were not being addressed and not recognized by the lead service. But DoD did not have the data to be able to see if that was the case or not.

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Alyssa Czyz. She’s director of defense capabilities and management at GAO. Well, the lack of data, I think, gets to the next point that you made in the report, which is ongoing cost-sharing disputes between the military services, totaling billions of dollars. Is the structure on these joint bases such that it is like a tenant-landlord relationship — the supporting organization collects rents or fees from the organizations that are tenants, and that’s still not clear?

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Alissa Czyz So the lead service is generally responsible for the sustainment of facilities and infrastructure of the supporting services. But what we found was this: There’s a lack of guidance on how that process bears out. Basically, it’s supposed to start at the base level and then if there’s dispute there, it kind of goes up the chain all the way up to the Office of Secretary of Defense. There’s a lot of agreements that were out of date. The guidance was confusing. That process was very laborious and time-intensive…and as a result, there were numerous cost disputes, which we point out some examples in the report, where one service felt like their needs were not being addressed by the other service. We have an entire appendix in the reports talking about a situation on Joint Base Hickam in Hawaii, where there was an airfield in really disrepair that the Air Force really needed for their mission. And there was sort of a patchwork going on for several years where they were patching asphalt onto this airfield. Gravel was kind of flying up into the fighter jets that were crossing that. It was a very serious situation, but the Navy disputed whether they needed to fund that or not. This went all the way up outside of the process to the secretaries of the Navy and Air Force, who finally had to step in and get a resolution to that issue. And that’s one example, but there are several cost disputes kind of not understanding the process there.

Terry Gerton You’ve given us a really significant operational impact from those disputes. How is the resolution process supposed to work? Is there an operational governance mechanism inside DoD?

Alissa Czyz Yes. So, I had mentioned that the process was very confusing. There were a lot of different guidance documents governing that. During the course of our review, DoD did put out new guidance last summer that does clarify roles and responsibilities, and we point that out in the report. We do think that that’s a good step, that that may move things in the right direction to get a better understanding of what the process should be. We were actually going to make a recommendation on that, but DoD proactively put out that guidance. So we do think that that has benefits, that it could resolve some of the issues that we pointed out.

Terry Gerton So beyond the funding and governance issues that we’ve just talked through, the report also indicates that there are pretty significant workforce shortages amongst the personnel who are responsible for managing these joint-based facilities. How do those staffing gaps then compound the risks of deferred maintenance and facility degradation?

Alissa Czyz It’s another significant factor. We found significant workforce shortages, but really the problem was that none of the military services had reassessed their workforce requirements for their maintenance workforce since joint bases were established. So many, many years had passed. Missions were increasing on several of these bases, but they didn’t really understand what their maintenance work force needs were. So it was hard to target actions to increase those workforces when they didn’t really know what the requirements were.

Terry Gerton Is this a function that could be contracted out, so that as we’ve watched the Department of Defense go through some pretty significant workforce reductions over the last year, perhaps they don’t intend to replace these folks? Maybe they intend to do it via contract?

Alissa Czyz There are different models, and some of them do use contractors. That’s not without their challenges as well. Sometimes it takes longer to get contractors in for emergent requirements, too. So using a contractor workforce is an option that some of the services do use, but they need to think strategically about that and really understand what their workforce needs are, regardless of who’s going to perform that work.

Terry Gerton When you look at this whole issue — funding, governance, staffing, guidance — GAO’s made a number of recommendations here. Walk us through those and what’s really at the top of the list; which one, if they could take care of it, would make a big difference?

Alissa Czyz We had five recommendations in this report. The first one, and I would say the most important one, is that DoD really needs to assess the risks of underfunding its facility sustainment. So as I mentioned, they were only funding to about 57% of their requirement. That has had real impacts on missions and operations on these bases. But they don’t understand, right? We hear a lot of talk about DoD willing to accept risk. But really understanding what those risks are and doing that analysis is very important, so we had a recommendation on that. The other recommendations go toward the issues we’ve been talking about — getting better information on how funding is allocated among the various services on joint bases; not having that basic information on how you’re spending the money for sustainment is the real problem for DoD, so getting better visibility over funding so they can take actions. And then the last three recommendations go to the military departments to assess their workforce requirements for maintenance on their installations.

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