Defense Infrastructure: DOD Needs to Periodically Review Support Standards and Costs at Joint Bases and Better Inform Congress of Facility Sustainment Funding Uses

DOD partially agreed with our recommendation to periodically review administrative costs as joint basing is implemented to minimize any additional costs and prevent the loss of existing installation support efficiencies. DOD stated that it had already established a process to periodically review joint basing costs as part of DOD's planning, program, budget and execution system and that the joint base memorandum of agreement template requires periodic reviews of mission and resource impacts. Thus, DOD stated that further action to implement the recommendation was not necessary. DOD's response to our recommendation describes the processes DOD intends to use to review costs after the joint bases have been implemented. However, our recommendation calls for reviewing costs during the joint base implementation process--not only after implementation has been completed. As illustrated by the examples cited in this report, the opportunity to reduce some joint base administrative costs and prevent the loss of existing installation support efficiencies exists during the time that the individual installations are working out the details on how to combine into a joint base. Thus, we continue to believe that DOD needs to take additional steps to perform periodic reviews to try to avoid losing existing efficiencies during the joint base implementation process and to help ensure that each joint base is established as economically and efficiently as possible. Because DOD plans no further action on this recommendation, we have closed the recommendation as not implemented.