Federal Reports

What We Looked At The Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) Next Generation Air Transportation System aims to modernize the Nation’s air traffic system and provide safer and more efficient air traffic management. The Terminal Flight Data Manager (TFDM) program, an almost $1 billion part of this modernization effort, will address a top FAA and industry priority to improve airport surface operations. FAA is currently testing and implementing key TFDM capabilities at airports across the Nation, introducing electronic flight strips and surface management tools to improve efficiency at airports. Given the large investment in TFDM, as well as concerns about program deployment cost and schedule, the Chairmen and Ranking Members of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure and its Subcommittee on Aviation requested that we review FAA’s current implementation plan for TFDM. Specifically, we assessed FAA’s progress in implementing TFDM, including its core capabilities. What We Found While FAA has begun to deploy TFDM, it has experienced significant delays of nearly 3 years in its deployment. A nearly 20 percent cost increase since 2016 has also caused a reduction in deployment sites from 89 to 49; therefore, increasing the estimated cost per site while decreasing planned system consolidations and functionality. Although FAA significantly reduced the program’s scope, the Agency retained the large deployment sites that are expected to provide over 90 percent of the original anticipated monetized benefits. However, funding uncertainty will remain which could impact the number of future deployment sites. Additionally, FAA and airspace users will not realize major benefits, such as fuel and carbon emissions savings, until at least 2025 and FAA continues to face implementation risks in areas such as system integration, airline participation, future cybersecurity requirements, and air traffic controller human factors and training.  Our Recommendations We made three recommendations to improve FAA’s TFDM program. The Agency concurred with all three of our recommendations and provided appropriate planned actions and completion dates. 

District of Columbia Workmen’s Compensation Act Special Fund Financial Statements and Independent Auditors’ Report September 30, 2023, and 2022

As part of its Delivering for America plan, the U.S. Postal Service is purchasing and deploying approximately 66,000 electric vehicles and charging stations to support its delivery fleet modernization. The Postal Service generally combined this rollout with its efforts to convert plants into consolidated sorting and delivery centers. It planned to use excess power from converted plants to reduce power upgrades and scheduling risks. The Postal Service expects to complete construction at 130 sites by the end of 2024 and to deploy electric vehicles at an estimated 800 sites by 2028. As of March 26th, 2024, the Postal Service confirmed it completed construction and commissioning at six sites.

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The OIG received a hotline allegation in June 2022 concerning delays of over 30 days to complete burials at the Santa Fe National Cemetery. In August 2022, the executive director of the National Cemetery Administration (NCA) Pacific District substantiated the delays and attributed them to limited permanent committal shelter space (only one was available), the number of burials feasible per day (no more than nine), family preference, and COVID 19 restrictions.The OIG analyzed data for all NCA burials completed from January 1, 2022, through March 31, 2023. On average, the time from notification to burial was 33 days with a range of 1 to 799 days. Although NCA policy does not set a time requirement, the OIG conducted this audit to determine whether NCA’s oversight ensures the preferences of families are appropriately considered when scheduling burials and can identify potential burial delays.The OIG found that NCA does not have sufficient data to determine if it is scheduling burials in accordance with family preferences and identifying potential burial delays. The two information systems that contain data on burials do not log family preferences. Therefore, the OIG team listened to recorded scheduling phone calls to the National Cemetery Scheduling Office (NCSO) for a sample of burials. The team projected those results to all 5,200 burials that took place in the audit period. The team estimated that for some 2,800 burials with a recorded call scheduling a burial, family preferences were met for about 97 percent. The other 3 percent lacked sufficient information because the scheduled burial was subsequently changed without documentation to indicate whether the changes were at the family’s or NCA’s request.The OIG recommended NCA obtain the capability to identify and monitor potential scheduling delays and ensure family preferences are being met at national cemeteries.