From the U.S. Government Accountability Office, www.gao.gov

Transcript for: DHS Quick Look

Description: Audio interview by GAO staff with Michele Mackin, Director,
Acquisition and Sourcing Management

Related GAO Work: GAO-16-338SP: Homeland Security Acquisitions: DHS Has
Strengthened Management, but Execution and Affordability Concerns Endure

Released: March 2016


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[ Narrator: ] Welcome to GAO's Watchdog Report, your source for news and
information from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. It's March
2016. Each year the Department of Homeland Security invests billions of
dollars in major acquisition programs. A team led by Michele Mackin, a
director in GAO's Acquisition and Sourcing Management team, recently
completed this year's "quick look" at how well DHS is overseeing this
spending. Jacques Arsenault sat down with Michele to talk about what
they found.

[ Jacques Arsenault: ] GAO looks at DHS's major acquisition programs
each year. Can you give me some examples of what these programs or
systems are?

[ Michele Mackin: ] Sure, Jacques. It's actually a very diverse range of
major acquisitions and at DHS, major acquisitions are programs expected
to cost $300 million or more. So you have coastguard ships and aircraft,
TSA, the Baggage and Passenger Screening Systems we're all familiar with
at airports. Customs and Border Protection has towers for surveillance
along the southwest border, and of course like all agencies some major
IT acquisitions.

[ Jacques Arsenault: ] And about how big is your portfolio overall?

[ Michele Mackin: ] It's about $7 billion in major acquisitions.

[ Jacques Arsenault: ] So then, in this year's look, what were some of
things that you found?

[ Michele Mackin: ] This year in the quick look we looked at one year,
so during calendar year 2015 what happened to the major acquisitions?
And what we found is that 8 of 25 major acquisition programs which were
in our scope had cost increases, schedule slips, or both. The cost
increases averaged about $1.7 billion and about an 11-month average
schedule slip. And the reasons for these are varied but I guess one of
the more troubling reasons is that the estimates, in many cases, weren't
sound to begin with, and this has been something we've noted for years
and it's been an issue at the department that management has been trying
to work on. We have found that for the 25 major programs, 12 had changed
key performance requirements since 2008. And by "key" we mean the most
important requirements, so airspeed for an aircraft, for example, or
detection capabilities for the towers along the southwest border. Again,
part of the reason, in some cases legitimately, the threats evolving,
new capabilities needed to be added and so forth. In other cases, the
requirements were not well defined to begin with.

[ Jacques Arsenault: ] Sure, so they're sort of facing the impacts of
poor planning earlier on.

[ Michele Mackin: ] Exactly, exactly.

[ Jacques Arsenault: ] Now, I noticed that you also have found that
there were some improvements in some of the ways that DHS is managing at
least some of the projects, can you talk about those?

[ Michele Mackin: ] Yeah, we've seen I would say in last 2 years some
very real progress at the department, and that is largely due to
sustained attention by senior leadership. We've reported for many years
their acquisition policies are actually very sound, they reflect a
knowledge-based, milestone-based approach, which is good. But when
you're dealing with these components that all kind of came together in
2003 with varying capabilities, it's been a struggle to kind of make
sure that acquisition policy flows down and is implemented at all the
components and by all the programs.

[ Jacques Arsenault: ] Now despite those improvements, this year GAO's
making multiple recommendations and we've made recommendations in the
past. Can you talk a little bit about those recommendations and what, if
any, progress DHS has made on the previous recommendations?

[ Michele Mackin: ] Sure, this year we really focused on affordability
and funding in our recommendations. The department itself has
acknowledged it has about a 30 percent gap between what these major
programs are expected to cost, and the money they're expected to receive
for a 5-year period. And the Chief Financial Officer has made a
concerted effort to kind of get a handle on this and has made really
good progress but we did recommend some areas including reporting to
Congress just to make sure that, that attention is kept up. Over the
years since 2005, we've made 64 acquisition-management-related
recommendations to the department. They've implemented most of them,
into the 40's. We have seen progress there, they normally agree with
what we're saying and are trying to do the right thing.

[ Jacques Arsenault: ] And finally, what would you say is the bottom
line in this report?

[ Michele Mackin: ] I would say, you know, they're not out of the woods
yet. They're still trying to implement this policy at all levels
throughout the department, but we definitely have seen improvement here,
again, due to the sustained leadership attention which is clearly needed
there to make sure all the programs and components are on board. We'll
keep an eye on it and do our next quick look and see what the situation
looks like next year.

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