Summary: In response to a congressional request, GAO examined whether the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the General Services Administration (GSA) are providing the necessary leadership and making sound decisions for managing the federal government's telecommunications.
GAO noted that OMB is required to develop, in consultation with GSA, a 5-year plan for meeting the federal government's telecommunications needs, but the agencies have not: (1) collected adequate information on agency requirements for various telecommunications services; (2) derived appropriate methodologies for evaluating governmentwide costs; (3) made decisions as to which services should be provided centrally; and (4) identified the need for specific technical standards. GAO found that the absence of meaningful governmentwide planning has: (1) left the government open to the risk of serious problems in developing and replacing telecommunications systems; and (2) made it impossible to determine whether the government is meeting overall telecommunications objectives. In addition, GAO found that: (1) GSA did not support important procurement decisions with meaningful analyses; (2) a GSA analysis of alternatives to replacing the existing Federal Telecommunications System (FTS) lacked credibility; (3) GSA awarded a contract for a more extensive analysis of FTS replacement alternatives, including a cost-benefit analysis of principal alternatives; (4) GSA did not consider the sharing of telecommunications systems when it reviewed agencies' requests for authority to acquire their own systems; and (5) the government would have saved an estimated $16 million over a 10-year period if GSA had approved shared, rather than individual, systems in three locations.
