DOD Installation Services: Action Needed to Improve Oversight of Intergovernmental Support Agreements

Filed 1h ago · Via GAO · The Buffoon Desk

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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Shixart1985 · CC BY 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

A GAO report finds that the Defense Department's use of intergovernmental support agreements, deals letting military bases share services like utilities and road maintenance with local governments, grew from 45 in 2018 to 316 in 2025. Despite officials' enthusiasm for expanding the practice further, GAO found the services' cost-savings estimates did not follow best practices, and some agreements had no cost estimate or cost-benefit analysis at all.

The Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force also lacked procedures to verify whether projected savings matched actual costs after the fact. Separately, GAO found that in nine of 21 reviewed agreements, private contractors performing the work were paid under wage rates that varied from what federal law would require for comparable work under standard federal service contracts.

GAO issued five recommendations for better cost-estimating guidance and verification procedures; the military services generally agreed and said they'd take unspecified action.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

Seven times more of these deals since 2018, and nobody thought to check whether the savings they were bragging about were real. That's the kind of bookkeeping where you tell everybody you got a great deal on the truck without ever looking at what you actually paid for gas and repairs after. The Pentagon says it 'concurred' with the recommendations, which in this business usually means a memo gets written and filed somewhere nobody looks again.

Source: Read the original at GAO → Scored: DarxieLand · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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