AUDIT: U.S. Navy Wasted $2 Billion Taxpayer Dollars
The U.S. Navy spent billions of taxpayer dollars to modernize its cruisers to extend their service lives rather than retire them.
Federal auditors who surveyed what’s going on, however, report that modernizing the fleet has resulted in many schedule delays, wasted costs, and a great deal of shoddy workmanship.
This is according to a recently-released audit from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO).
“Since 2015, the Navy has spent about $3.7 billion modernizing seven of the Ticonderoga class guided-missile cruisers — large surface combatants that provide key air defense capabilities. However, only three of the seven ships will complete modernization, and none will gain five years of service life, as intended. The Navy wasted $1.84 billion modernizing four cruisers that have now been divested prior to deploying,” according to the audit.
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“The Navy also experienced contractor performance and quality issues across the cruiser effort. For example, the contractor performed poor quality work on USS Vicksburg’s sonar dome—a critical element of the Anti-Submarine Warfare mission area—resulting in additional cost and schedule delays due to necessary rework.”
According to auditors, Navy officials did not effectively plan the cruiser effort. This led to a high volume of unplanned work — 9,000 contract changes ‚ resulting in cost growth and schedule delays.
“The Navy has yet to identify the root causes of unplanned work or develop and codify root cause mitigation strategies to prevent poor planning from similarly affecting future surface ship modernization efforts,” auditors wrote.
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“Further, weakened quality assurance tools restricted the Navy’s ability to hold contractors accountable for poor quality work.”
In 2018, Navy leadership restricted maintenance officials from assessing monetary penalties to contractors without senior leadership approval.
In 2020, leadership changed procedures to reduce inspections, which are a vital tool for overseeing ship repair contracts, by almost 50 percent.
In 2012 and 2013, the Navy proposed retiring several cruisers due to budget constraints. Congress rejected the Navy’s proposal but provided funding to modernize these ships.
The Navy planned to use a phased approach to modernization that would extend 11 cruisers’ service life by five years and upgrade the vessels’ combat capability. The Navy originally planned to complete all 11 cruisers by fiscal year 2026. The Navy has other upcoming significant surface ship modernization efforts, such as for 23 destroyers. The success of these efforts is critical to the Navy having a combat-ready fleet.
Special thanks to Warhammer’s Wife proofreading this story before publication to make certain there were no misspellings, grammatical errors or other embarrassing mistakes and/or typos. Follow Warhammer on Twitter @Real_Warhammer
