Pursuit's Take
The Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) is charged with modernizing the National Airspace System. Since fiscal year 2008, Congress has appropriated over $7 billion for the program including over $1.7 billion for developmental projects. FAA manages these projects through the project level agreements (PLAs)—an internal control mechanism for documenting the agreed-upon work and managing project execution. However, NextGen lacks proper controls on developmental projects.
According to the report, 12 of the 22 PLAs the Office of Inspector General sampled did not align with FAA’s high-priority NextGen investment decisions. As a result, it is unclear why FAA selected these as developmental projects. In addition, “FAA provided funds prior to PLA approval about 32 percent of the time over a 5-year period,” costing an estimated $370 million. “FAA has also had difficulty obligating funds to developmental projects, with available funds exceeding $500 million for most years. These problems occurred in part because the Agency lacked effective planning and final standard operating procedures for the PLA process until 2016, 8 years after beginning to use PLAs.”
Further, NextGen has not effectively executed and measured the outcomes of NextGen developmental projects, and has also lacked a clearly established framework for managing the overall oversight of NextGen developmental projects.
Read the full report