Michael Bennet Slams Officials On GAO Delays: We’re ‘Wasting Time And Money, And Failing To Deliver'

3 months ago

Earlier this month, Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) questioned officials on program delays and extended wait times during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing.

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00:00because she's got a team that has been helping try to help figure this out as well. So, Senator Bennett.

00:04Thanks, Mr. Chairman, and I appreciate your mentioning that. Dr. Plum, that's actually

00:08where I'm headed, so I appreciate it. Mr. Chairman, we have heard what a disaster the development of

00:16the National Background Investigation System has been, and it sounds like, I hope, the review team

00:22has a clear understanding of what needs to happen to get this back on track, and I look forward to

00:27regular updates on the progress. Others have covered the costs here. I want to focus on the

00:32schedule delays. GAO reported in June 2023 that 16 of the 25 major IT business programs at DOD

00:40reported cost or schedule changes since January 2021, including 12 that had cost increases ranging

00:47from $43,000 to $194 million, had scheduling delays, I think there were 12, ranging from

00:553 to 33 months, and program officials attributed to the changes to factors such as new requirements

01:03and unanticipated technical complexities that I'm sure drove scope in some way that

01:10might have been predicted, I guess. But my question is broader than NBIS. It's at the

01:15pattern of large-scale IT acquisition and software development across the federal government.

01:21The chairman mentioned FAFSA and our veterans health systems, but we could list what feels like

01:27an endless, endless, endless list of examples, by the way, examples where people are here to do the

01:34work but never here for the accountability when we were doing our oversight. The IRS, you know,

01:44comes to mind in my mind actually recently as a decent implementation, but I'll put that to one

01:51side. Dr. Plum, in your statement for the record, you laid out three key points that this team

01:57will adopt, fixing the data architecture and adopting a modern approach, building the right

02:03team with the right skills and technical acumen, and adopting digital transformation best practices.

02:09My question is why can't we seem to adopt these principles

02:13across the federal government or at least in the IC and the DOD? Until these principles are

02:18mandatory, we're going to experience these failures again and again, wasting time and money

02:23and failing to deliver for the taxpayers. Would you like to say a word about that, Dr. Plum?

02:30Thank you, Senator. I think maybe the way to start this is fundamentally our acquisition

02:36models in the U.S. government and the Department of Defense in particular have remained hardware

02:41centric. So we fund them in similar ways to the way we fund hardware procurement, and we use

02:47feature delivery as our milestone markers for progress on them. Companies that manage IT

02:54successfully with minimal disruption to users have a more continuous integration and continuous

02:59delivery and deployment pipeline process that, for instance, only takes software offline for

03:04very short periods of time to do upgrades and invest 70 to 80 percent of the total program cost

03:10into the back-end data architecture and infrastructure as compared to the front-end

03:15user interfaces and features. So inside the broader question of software acquisition,

03:22while we have authorities and the software acquisition pathway, the traditional program

03:28management oversight and processes have tended to drive focus on the wrong areas, and that creates

03:36both a prioritization problem where prioritization is on front-end user interfaces and new

03:42features rather than back-end investments, and funding issues because those back-end technical

03:50complexities cost money and take extra time. In the context of ENBIS, driving our

03:57recommendations is really focusing on those back-end improvements, keeping what we can, building new

04:04things where we need to, and then marrying that up with an agile continuous process for software

04:10development and delivery so that we don't face these problems again in the future.

04:16And I'll just close by saying that while we, of course, want to get to the point where we're

04:21meeting the full set of the requirements, there's no point at which this is done, and I think moving

04:27to a mindset where this is a continuous development and improvement process that will continually

04:34manage and upgrade the back-end technology and front-end features is part of what can prevent this.

04:39And Dr. Plum, with the last 30 seconds that I have, could you talk a little bit about the

04:44Defense Digital Service and, you know, is this the type of team that we can bring in that

04:50agencies, you know, working with either the principles that you've described or some rationale

04:57at least could help make a difference in these kind of implementations?

05:02Absolutely. The Defense Digital Service focuses on, they serve as our chief product office inside the

05:08chief digital and AI office in the Pentagon. They focus on a what we call product management

05:14approach to delivery, which means they combine a product manager who owns a roadmap and that

05:20agile development process oversight with software engineers and user experience designers and

05:25researchers. The idea of that, what we call product trio, is to focus on turning the requirements that

05:32come in from customers into technical requirements and roadmaps and then ensuring that there is a

05:39systematic execution of those that are linked to continuous testing and user experience. And this

05:46team is one that we apply to major issues and concerns inside the department that rise to a

05:51sort of priority senior leader level like Envis. Dr. Plum, for your oversight of this, I'd

06:02it's going to be hard to get to the bottom of all of it and I'm grateful that you're making it a priority.

06:11Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Michael Bennet Slams Officials On GAO Delays: We’re ‘Wasting Time And Money, And Failing To Deliver'

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