GAO: Priority Open Recommendations: National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Dear Administrator Bridenstine:
The purpose of this letter is to provide an update on the overall status of the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration’s implementation of GAO’s recommendations and to call
your personal attention to areas where open recommendations should be given high priority.1 In
November 2019, we reported that on a government-wide basis, 77 percent of our
recommendations made 4 years ago were implemented.2 NASA’s recommendation
implementation rate was 63 percent. As of March 2020, NASA had 48 open recommendations.
Fully implementing all open recommendations could significantly improve NASA’s operations.
Since our April 2019 letter, NASA has implemented 1 of our 9 open priority recommendations
and we closed a second recommendation as not implemented. With respect to the implemented
recommendation, NASA coordinated with the Secretary of Energy, the Secretary of Health and
Human Services, and the Director of the National Science Foundation in several interagency
efforts to standardize administrative research requirements. As a result, the agencies identified
two potential areas for standardization or harmonization of requirements, such as the policy for
what constitutes a financial conflict of interest. For the second, closed recommendation, NASA
took some steps to assess opportunities for competition for future variants of the Space Launch
System. However, NASA did not provide Congress with a comprehensive assessment of the
extent to which development and production of future elements of the SLS could be
competitively procured. There is no longer an opportunity within the current SLS program to
take action on this recommendation.
NASA has 7 priority recommendations remaining from those we identified in the 2019 letter. We
ask your continued attention on those remaining priority recommendations. We also are adding
5 new recommendations related to cost estimates for its human exploration missions and
addressing cybersecurity concerns. This brings the total number of priority recommendations to
12. (See enclosure for the list of recommendations).
