FAA's Culture of Fear

THE DAILY FED

FAA's Culture of Fear

The GAO report, Aviation Acquisition: A Comprehensive Strategy is Needed for Cultural Change at FAA, found that FAA management of the acquisition process relied on a rigid hierarchy of stakeholders, discouraging officials from reporting inefficiencies and setbacks in the FAA's modernization efforts.

FAA began modernizing the nation's air traffic control systems in the early 1980s. Since then, project costs have soared, schedule delays of over five years are common, and few new systems have been fully implemented.

Through fiscal year 1996, the Congress will have provided $22 billion of the $35 billion FAA estimates it will need to modernize by 2003, or 63 percent of its modernization budget. But of its 147 modernization projects, FAA had completed only 74 by March 1996, totaling $5.1 billion, only about 15 percent of the program's overall cost, the GAO reported.

The centerpiece of the modernization program, the Advanced Automation System, was restructured in 1994 after 11 years of schedule delays and after estimated costs tripled to over $7 billion from a 1983 estimate of $2.5 billion. The Voice Switching and Control System was implemented six years behind schedule, after the cost per VSCS unit jumped sixfold, from $10.3 million to $63.2 million. A 1995 internal study found that a backlog of installation of field equipment had risen to an equivalent of 1,300 staff years.

FAA officials frequently suppressed bad news to protect their projects and their jobs, GAO reported. A 1995 survey of FAA acquisition employees revealed they focused on survival instead of on the FAA mission because:

• Six of every 10 respondents said employees are hesitant to say what they think for fear of retaliation.
• Over half did not think managers supported employees who brought up difficult issues.
• Almost half believed that pointing out unrealistic project deadlines would be held against them.

Though the GAO began reporting weaknesses in FAA acquisition management almost since the modernization program started, FAA has implemented only one major reform effort focused on culture change. But GAO said that effort, the Integrated Product Development System (IPDS), which established 13 product teams to coordinate interdepartmental cooperation, has not gained support agencywide. Only one of the 13 teams has obtained approval for its plan to improve mission focus and efficiency. Team members say midlevel managers try to circumvent the teams, while some team members themselves do not believe in the team decision-making concept. Though the GAO recognizes the IPDS as a promising effort, it recommended the FAA administrator should develop a sweeping strategy for cultural change.

While FAA generally agreed with the GAO findings, the agency said the new acquisition management system, started in April, will address many of the problems the GAO cited. The new system, created in response to requirements of the 1996 Department of Transportation appropriations measure, requires long-term cost analysis and requests that teams provide lessons-learned documentation for actions they take.