When the House Armed Services Committee reported the sweeping National Defense Authorization Act of 2024 by an overwhelming 58-1 vote, it adopted a quick and simple solution to the research problem. The Pentagon’s Office of Cost and Program Evaluation (CAPE) failed to support a congressionally mandated plan to build more amphibious warships on a faster schedule for the Marine Corps, but President Biden’s fiscal 2024 The defense budget request also avoided this plan. The House committee’s solution is to abolish the agency, remove the director, and give the job to someone in another Pentagon office who is perhaps even more servile to the committee.

It’s a little awkward for a congressional committee to reach out to an independent but equal government agency to tell people what to think, but considering Congress has a monopoly on the money under the constitution, Repeal is a recommendation that the House Armed Services Committee can implement. — if the rest of the House and Senate members agree.

Rather, the rest of Congress should reject the arrogance of House committees and instead radically revitalize CAPE, which – in fact – continues and even worsens. It is indistinguishable from the kind of effort that the Department of Defense’s medical condition calls for. Modifications must be made at the heart of the operation, with her CAPE people and bureaucratic positions (and possibly locations as well), as explained below.

Once upon a time, firing people and abolishing government agencies for what the lawmakers in power believed to be wrong was the age-old response of Congress to unwanted research. In 1995, as part of Newt Gingrich’s so-called congressional spending reform, Congress abolished its own Office of Technology Evaluation.

It is no coincidence that the Office of Technology Assessment did not match the enthusiasm of most Republicans for national missile defense. Shortly thereafter, I was tasked as Senator Pete Domenisi’s National Security Analyst on the Senate Budget Committee to resolve a letter from several Republican Senators calling for the dismissal of the Congressional Budget Office’s analyst team. rice field. It put the cost of a national missile defense substantially higher than its advocates wanted to admit. As budget chairman, Mr. Domenici was in a position to make the CBO’s life miserable if he did not comply. To his credit, Domenici was in favor of missile defense, but he rejected this. He knew that making the CBO a toy of Congress’ whims meant the death of its credibility.

But CAPE’s problem goes beyond the crude behavior of the House Armed Services Committee. CAPE was founded by Arizona Republican Senator John McCain. Under the Weapons Systems Acquisition Reform Act of 2009, the former Office of Planning, Analysis and Evaluation was replaced by Michigan Democratic Party Carl Levin. The company known as PA&E had mixed results. During the 1970s and his 1980s, he had a reputation for doing exceptional work under some of the directors and managers such as Russell Murray and Thomas Christie. However, there was not much opposition to the reorganization into CAPE, as the firm’s operations had declined since its heyday and it was clearly in need of a revitalization. Unfortunately there was no revival. As the 2018 RAND study revealed, CAPE’s cost analysis was methodologically weak and consistently wrong. The organization was never the center of the much-needed rigorous analysis of Pentagon issues that sometimes characterized his PA&E in its early years. Note, for example, that he lacks a single example of persuasive analysis in some of his CAPE ex-director commentaries opposing HASC’s repeal of recommendations.

Some on the Senate Armed Services Committee have serious concerns about the nature and quality of CAPE’s work. These concerns are described in reports as the need to “fine-tune” the organization, perhaps to create a “competitive analysis cell” to induce better work within the organization.

It’s clear that CAPE needs to be fixed. The question is how?

As Assistant Director of GAO’s Program Evaluation and Methodology Division (PEMD), I had the privilege of working with an organization that possessed the characteristics that those interested in revitalizing CAPE should cultivate there. ) Under the guidance of its astute and usually outspoken Director, Eleanor Chelimsky, PEMD has specialized in how to design groundbreaking assessments and has continued to do so. At PEMD’s Defense Division, we did a job that other members of the GAO said was impossible, but when we did it, the GAO critics said the Pentagon didn’t like it, so we ‘s work cannot be right. When a comprehensive assessment of air warfare in Desert Storm, using proprietary database integrations, proved that the performance of many high-cost aircraft and munitions was ridiculously overestimated, A GAO critic said: We argued that the evidence against us was that Air Force officials said we were wrong. Data collected by the Air Force itself, numerous pilots during the war, and hundreds of post-mortem and other reports all say otherwise.