NASA Has Lots Of Open GAO Action Items

Keith’s note: according to GAO Report Open Recommendations: National Aeronautics and Space Administration: “Since our May 2023 letter, NASA has implemented four of our nine open priority recommendations. … We ask your continued attention to the remaining five priority recommendations. We are not adding any new recommendations this year:

• To provide the Congress with the necessary insight into program affordability, ensure its ability to effectively monitor total program costs and execution, and facilitate investment decisions, the NASA Administrator should direct the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate to establish a separate cost and schedule baseline for work required to support the Space Launch System (SLS) Block I Exploration Mission-2 (EM-2) and report this information to the Congress through NASA’s annual budget submission.11 If NASA decides to fly the SLS Block I beyond EM-2, NASA should establish separate life-cycle cost and schedule baseline estimates for those efforts, to include funding for operations and sustainment, and report this information annually to Congress via the agency’s budget submission.
• To provide the Congress with the necessary insight into program planning and affordability, and to decrease the risk of cost and schedule overruns, NASA’s Administrator should direct the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate to identify a range of possible missions for each future SLS variant that includes cost and schedule estimates and plans for how those possible missions would fit within NASA’s funding profile.
• The NASA Administrator should ensure that the NASA Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations creates a life-cycle cost estimate for the Artemis III mission.
• The Administrator of NASA should fully define and document the role of the senior agency official for privacy or other designated privacy official in reviewing and approving system categorizations, overseeing privacy control assessments, and reviewing authorization packages.
• The NASA Administrator should ensure the NASA Senior Procurement Executive uses a balanced set of performance metrics to manage the agency’s procurement organizations, including outcome-oriented metrics to measure (a) cost savings/avoidance, (b) timeliness of deliveries, (c) quality of deliverables, and (d) end-user satisfaction.”