WASHINGTON — Last Thursday, two days before the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated in the cloudless blue sky over Texas, killing its seven-person international crew, the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, issued its biennial report on "high-risk" operations of the government.
Prominent among those agencies and programs identified in the report was the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) contract management function.
The GAO report was not specific to the shuttle and made no mention of Columbia, the oldest vehicle in the fleet. Nor did it mention the United Space Alliance, the private consortium formed by the Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp., which since 1996 has taken over space shuttle operations as a government contractor.
But noting that NASA "spends over $12 billion a year" on its contractors, the GAO report said: "Since 1990, we have identified NASA’s contract management function as an area of high risk, principally because it has lacked accurate and reliable financial and management information on contract spending, and it has not placed enough emphasis on end results, product performance and cost control." This failure, it said, "threatens the success of NASA’s major programs."
Other audits had been much tougher and more specific in warning of dangers in the shuttle program. Last April, Richard Blomberg, the chairman of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, said the group’s concerns were the greatest in 15 years. "I have never been as worried for space shuttle safety as I am right now," Blomberg told a congressional oversight committee. His panel blamed budget cuts and periodic hiring freezes for eroding engineering skills in the program and making it impossible even to "maintain the safety risk level" of flying the shuttles, let alone improving safety.
Those safety issues will now be examined afresh. But the striking thing to me is that the GAO report, which reiterated these criticisms of NASA operations for the 13th straight year, also identified 22 other major federal programs that it termed equally "high-risk." And only seven of the 14 operations that were on that original 1990 "high-risk" list have been improved enough to warrant removal.
Among the many areas of government where critical services are seriously deficient or costs and inefficiencies unacceptably high, according to the GAO, are many that directly affect the lives and well being of the American people. Agencies on the watch list include the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Education, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the U.S. Postal Service and the Federal Aviation Administration.
Several operations of the Defense Department are in the same category. The newly created Department of Homeland Security was given a "high-risk" rating at its birth, mainly because of the organizational challenges facing Secretary Tom Ridge and his associates and the concern that its vital functions could be lost in the bureaucratic shuffle.
More worrisome is the "high-risk" label that has been applied since 1997 to the lagging performance of the government in securing the country’s computerized information systems, including those of federal agencies themselves. The threat of cyber warfare continues to grow, the report says, while "we continue to report significant information security weaknesses in 24 major federal agencies."
All this is ominously reminiscent of the warnings of the growing threat of terrorism to people and property inside the United States that came from the commission headed by former Sens. Warren Rudman and Gary Hart — an alarm bell that went unheeded until Sept. 11, 2001, and one which they say is still not being sufficiently addressed.
The budget that President Bush offered this week needs to be examined in the context of what appears to be a pervasive problem — the failure to address the systemic shortcomings that are crippling too many important parts of our government. The headlines go to bold new ventures, whether they be a Medicare prescription drug benefit or an assault on AIDS in Africa.
But if the federal government lacks the basic ingredients it needs to do its job — sufficiently talented, motivated people, modern management and communications systems, and adequate funding to avoid risky short cuts — the result will almost certainly be costly.
The failures will not always provide the kind of television pictures and personal tragedies the Columbia explosion did. But the damage to the country will be no less.
We have been warned.
David Broder can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200.
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