Told to document its cost changes, DHS dissolved the office instead
Summary
Two consecutive GAO annual assessments of DHS's major acquisition programs -- one from February 2025, one from June 2026 -- track a substantially overlapping portfolio through a year in which costs kept growing at a similar pace, a third of programs lost significant staff, and the department dissolved its central acquisition-oversight office months after agreeing to have that office fix a documentation gap GAO had just found.
The costs keep growing, one report to the next
In February 2025, found that 17 of 's major acquisition programs with approved baselines had, combined, raised their cost goals from $33.1 billion to $41.3 billion since first setting them -- about $8.2 billion, or roughly a quarter, in growth. Nearly all 17 programs had revised their baselines at least once; seven had done so three times or more. Only one, the Coast Guard's Polar Security Cutter, was missing its current goals outright, having declared a breach in fiscal year 2024.
's next report, covering fiscal year 2025, found the same pattern in a larger set of programs: 19 baselined programs had, combined, raised their cost goals by $11.4 billion, or 26 percent, since they first set them. itself described this as similar in scale to what it had found the year before. Three programs drove most of it -- a cybersecurity monitoring program, CDM, grew by $4 billion; the Coast Guard's National Security Cutter grew by $3.5 billion; its Offshore Patrol Cutter grew by $2 billion. Eighteen of the 19 baselined programs were meeting their most recent goals; the Offshore Patrol Cutter, again, was not, with a new baseline revision underway to reflect further delays and cost increases.
View data as table
| Feb. 2025 report (17 baselined programs) | 8.2 |
|---|---|
| June 2026 report (19 baselined programs) | 11.4 |
Of the 27 major programs reviewed for the 2025 fiscal year, 8 had not yet reached the point in 's acquisition process where an approved baseline is even required. Of the 19 that had one, 15 -- nearly four in five -- had already revised it at least once.
A third of programs lost significant staff
's 2026 report also found that staff levels for 8 of the 27 programs it reviewed fell by 20 percent or more between October 2024 and September 2025, through a mix of terminated probationary employees, deferred resignations, and retirements. Program officials told the losses cost them subject-matter expertise and technical skills, and that they expected resulting schedule delays. More broadly, a majority of the 27 programs -- 14 of them, spanning Customs and Border Protection, , the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the Transportation Security Administration, and 's Management Directorate -- named staff uncertainty as a risk to hitting future milestones.
View data as table
| Total programs reviewed | 27 |
|---|---|
| Cited staff uncertainty as a risk | 14 |
| Lost 20%+ of staff | 8 |
Not every program reported the same exposure. Coast Guard programs account for 65 percent of the roughly $56 billion in total estimated acquisition costs tracked for fiscal year 2025 -- itself up only about 1 percent from the year before. Half of the Coast Guard's programs identified potential schedule risks of their own, but none attributed those risks to staff uncertainty.
The office told to fix the documentation gap no longer exists
The February 2025 report's core finding wasn't about cost growth -- it was about 's inability to explain it. reviewed the revision histories of five acquisition baselines across five components and found three did not consistently record why they'd been revised. Customs and Border Protection's Automated Commercial Environment program was the starkest example: its March 2024 baseline logged eight separate revisions without explaining the reason for any of them, even though the program had breached its cost or schedule goals twice. Two programs -- the Transportation Security Administration's Credential Authentication Technology and the Coast Guard's Offshore Patrol Cutter -- did document their change drivers thoroughly.
traced the gap to 's own guidance: its 2021 template told programs to record what changed and why, but never specified the categories of "change driver" -- a breach, a COVID-19-related update, an administrative update, a requirements change -- that a revision entry should name. recommended that the Secretary of have PARM's director update that guidance. agreed, targeting May 30, 2025 for implementation.
Months after that target date, in October 2025, dissolved PARM itself -- the office had just charged with fixing the gap, and the one that had run 's overall acquisition governance process since long before either of these reports. said the move would reduce redundancy and improve efficiency, and began spreading PARM's responsibilities across its Management Directorate. As of January 2026, officials told they were still unsure which office would even determine whether a program had breached its cost or schedule goals -- a determination PARM used to make. As of May 2026, the Chief Procurement Officer's office was still in the process of standing up a division to take on one piece of PARM's old portfolio. noted the dissolution echoes 's 2024 suspension of the Joint Requirements Council, another oversight body, at Congress's direction.
View data as table
| Addressed | 170 |
|---|---|
| Not yet fully addressed | 47 |
's overall record of acting on 's acquisition recommendations is, on paper, strong: of about 220 made since 2014, counted 170 as addressed and 47 as not yet fully addressed as of December 2024, three of them directed at PARM specifically. 's own June 2026 report made no new recommendations at all -- it simply logged what it found and said it would keep watching.
The takeaway
- Cost growth on 's major acquisition programs isn't a one-year anomaly. Two consecutive reports found double-digit-billion-dollar, roughly quarter-scale cost growth over initial goals -- $8.2 billion (about 25%) across 17 programs in February 2025, then $11.4 billion (26%) across 19 programs in June 2026 -- and itself called the two increases similar in scale.
- A third of 's major programs absorbed serious staff losses just as costs kept climbing. Eight of 27 programs lost 20% or more of their staff in a single year; a majority of all 27 named staff uncertainty as a risk to future milestones.
- The office told to fix 's documentation gap was dissolved months after the deadline itself set to fix it. agreed in February 2025 to have PARM specify what counts as a "change driver" in acquisition paperwork by May 30, 2025; by October 2025, PARM no longer existed, and as of 's most recent report, was still working out who would take over its core oversight functions.
The February 2025 findings on cost growth, baseline revisions, documentation gaps, and 's recommendation-response record are from -25-107317, ' Annual Assessment: Improved Guidance on Revised Acquisition Goals Would Enhance Transparency,' read directly and in full. The June 2026 findings on continued cost growth, staffing, and PARM's dissolution are from -26-108118, ' Annual Assessment: Dynamic Environment Affects Efforts to Manage Acquisition Risks,' also read directly and in full. Both reports are part of the same annual-assessment series and examine overlapping acquisition portfolios in consecutive years, but were issued independently and were not framed by as a before-and-after comparison.
Sources(2) ▾
- U.S. Government Accountability Office, DHS Annual Assessment: Dynamic Environment Affects Efforts to Manage Acquisition Risks (2026-06-09) — -26-108118, the 11th in 's annual series assessing 's major acquisition programs, a report to congressional committees. Read in full directly from the PDF via the Wayback mirror (direct gao.gov fetch blocked with HTTP 403). gao.gov · original document
- U.S. Government Accountability Office, DHS Annual Assessment: Improved Guidance on Revised Acquisition Goals Would Enhance Transparency (2025-02-25) — -25-107317, the 10th in the same annual series, a report to congressional committees -- a different facet (baseline-revision documentation practices and 's overall acquisition-recommendation track record) and fiscal year of the same acquisition-oversight program than doc-gao-108118 (FY2025 cost/staffing/organizational findings). Read in full directly from the PDF via the Wayback mirror (direct gao.gov fetch blocked with HTTP 403). gao.gov · original document
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The Department of Homeland Security spends tens of billions of dollars a year building the systems that screen travelers, patrol the border, and respond to disasters. has audited that spending in an annual series since 2015. Its February 2025 report⧉ found that 's major acquisition programs kept revising their cost and schedule targets without consistently documenting why -- and recommended that PARM, the office responsible for 's overall acquisition oversight, fix that. agreed, and set a target date of May 30, 2025. In October 2025, dissolved PARM. 's June 2026 report⧉, covering the year in between, found cost growth continuing at a similar pace, a third of programs losing significant staff, and PARM's former responsibilities still unsettled as of the report's most recent update.