Agency-by-Agency Issues: Department of Defense

Following each presidential election, GAO serves as a resource to assist with the transition to a new Congress and administration. Using its institutional knowledge and broad-based, nonpartisan work on matters across the government spectrum, GAO provides insight into, and recommendations for addressing, the nations major issues, risks and challenges. Also identified are key reports for further research, as well as contact information for and video messages from GAO experts.>> (EDITORS NOTE: Each link below leads to the relevant section of the GAOs transition website, where detailed analysis of the issues, of what GAO considers needs to be done, and links to relevant GAO reports, are available. Certainly worth a visit).>>> Department of Defense Overview>> The Department of Defenses (DOD) mission is to defend the United States from attack upon its territory and to secure its interests abroad. With an annual appropriation of about $512 billion in fiscal year 2009, and supplemental funding of about $807 billion in the past several years to support overseas military operations, DOD has been entrusted with more of the taxpayers dollars than any other federal agency.>> Given its size and mission, it is also the largest and most complex organization to manage in the world. As such, DOD faces a number of management challenges and underlying fiscal pressures to meet the demands of the current security environment and future threats and to achieve greater efficiency within its organization.>> Overall, DOD continues to experience a mismatch between its programs and budgets due to the use of overly optimistic planning assumptions and the lack of a strategic approach to investment decision making. As a result, it has too many programs for the available dollars, which often leads to program instability, costly program stretch-outs, and program termination.