Panel challenges GAO ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ report

Methods used by the Government Accountability Office to calculate the cost of the Defense Department's homosexual conduct policy are being challenged by a University of California commission whose members include a former Defense secretary.

A report released earlier this month by the 12-member UC-Santa Barbara blue-ribbon commission accused GAO of underestimating the cost of replacing military service members discharged under the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy, which allows homosexuals to serve provided they do not disclose their sexual orientation. In exchange, the military is barred from asking.

The February 2005 GAO report found that the overall cost to recruit and train replacements for the 9,488 service members separated from fiscal 1994, the year the policy was implemented, through fiscal 2003, was $190.5 million. But the California commission reported that the actual cost was $363.8 million.

Aaron Belkin, chairman of the commission and an associate professor of political science at the University of California, called the figures used by GAO "loopy." More specifically, they were too low and inconsistent with previous figures used, he said.

The 29-page report from the UC commission, which included former Defense Secretary William Perry, now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University, six professors and five military experts, said that GAO relied on "unrealistically low estimates" provided by the service branches.

Using publicly available figures on the cost of basic training and initial skills training, the commission estimated the cost to train replacements at $252.4 million, $157.3 million more than the $95.1 million figure reported by GAO.

Derek Stewart, director of GAO's Defense Capabilities and Management division, said the agency stands behind its work. Stewart signed off on the 50-page report (GAO-05-299).

"We have confirmation documents from the Department of Defense that our numbers included all training costs, including basic training," Stewart said. "We pinned this down to just the occupations that were being performed by people who were discharged . . . what would it cost to replace those people and to train somebody to take over the jobs of those discharged?"

The GAO report acknowledged that the auditors were unable to estimate some of the other costs associated with Don't Ask, Don't Tell due to the lack of data, including data about investigations, reviews, counseling and separations processing.

The UC report found an additional $32.1 million in separation travel and in costs associated with training replacements for the roughly 136 officers discharged under the policy.

GAO also failed to incorporate the monetary value the military recouped from service members prior to separation due to Don't Ask, Don't Tell, according to the UC report. Because of this additional calculation, the commission estimated the recruitment portion of the policy's cost at $79.3 million, down $16.1 million from GAO's figure of $95.4 million.

The difference on recruitment was small enough that the commission's overall cost estimate remained much higher than GAO's, however.

Stewart said that if the intent of the report is to attract attention to Don't Ask, Don't Tell because of its overall costs, then he's not sure that $363 million over a 10-year period will suffice, considering the size of the Pentagon's annual budget, which has ranged from $300 billion in the early 1990s to $439.3 billion in President Bush's fiscal 2007 request.

"If you use the GAO's $190 million figure, it amounts to $19 million per year over a 10-year period," Stewart said. "If you use the commission's figure, it is $36 million per year over a 10-year period. In the grand scheme of the DoD multibillion-dollar budgets, it's peanuts in either case."

Belkin, who is also the founder and director of the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military at UC, said it was "curious" that Stewart would minimize the policy's budgetary impact, stating that "it goes right to the heart of the sloppy methodology they used."

Rep. Martin Meehan, D-Mass., said in a statement to Government Executive that the UC commission "started where the GAO left off" in finding the policy's costs "to be almost double GAO's conservative estimate."

"In assessing the cost of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, we shouldn't shortchange the taxpayers or the brave service members who are directly affected by this failed policy," Meehan said.

A member of the House Armed Services Committee, Meehan is sponsoring legislation (H.R. 1059), which would overturn the current homosexual conduct policy. The bill has 109 co-sponsors and was referred to the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Military Personnel in March 2005.