Failed Procurement Programs
Billions spent, little delivered: auditors' autopsies of projects that collapsed under their own requirements.
11 documents · 1962–2023 · 10 issuers
Every failed program leaves an audit, and the audits tell the same story in different accents: requirements that never settled, testing skipped to hit a date, and oversight that saw the warning signs and signed off anyway. Read in order, these reports work as a short course in how large institutions fail to build things.
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The prototype: a vehicle shaped by budget caps and too many customers.
- 1999 QA-0046NASA · Official history
The Space Shuttle Decision: NASA's Search for a Reusable Space Vehicle (SP-4221)
T. A. Heppenheimer's official history of how the Shuttle's design was squeezed by Air Force requirements, OMB budget caps and political compromises in the early 1970s.
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A $1.5 billion mirror ground to the wrong shape, and the test results that were waved away.
- 1990 QA-0042NASA · Report
The Hubble Space Telescope Optical Systems Failure Report
The investigation into why the $1.5 billion telescope launched with a primary mirror ground to the wrong shape.
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Some programs fail by succeeding: a nuclear ramjet that worked and was cancelled.
- 1962 QA-0031LLNL · Report
Tory II-C hazards of operation (Project Pluto nuclear ramjet), Part 10
Livermore's hazards analysis for Tory II-C, the ground-test reactor of Project Pluto, a nuclear-powered ramjet missile meant to fly for weeks at low altitude while spewing radiation along its route.
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The Navy's late-1970s menu of futures it never bought.
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$170 million of case-management software that never shipped.
- 2005 QA-0066DOJ OIG · Report
The FBI's Management of the Trilogy Information Technology Modernization Project (Audit 05-07)
The audit of Trilogy, the FBI's post-9/11 IT overhaul, including the Virtual Case File software abandoned after about $170 million because it did not work.
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Iraq reconstruction: the inspector general's own history, now hosted on a mirror.
- 2009 QA-0076SIGIR · Report
Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience (SIGIR, 2009)
The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction's history of how more than $50 billion in U.S. reconstruction spending was planned, improvised and often wasted.
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Across the Atlantic, the NHS's national IT programme unravels.
- 2011 QA-0079NAO · Report
The National Programme for IT in the NHS: an update on the delivery of detailed care records systems (NAO, 2011)
The UK auditor's verdict on the core of the NHS National Programme for IT, among the most expensive civilian IT failures anywhere.
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A launch-day failure, explained line by line.
- 2015 QA-0065GAO · Report
Healthcare.gov: CMS Has Taken Steps to Address Problems, but Needs to Further Implement Systems Development Best Practices (GAO-15-238)
GAO's postmortem of the 2013 Healthcare.gov launch: inadequate capacity planning, uncorrected software errors, incomplete testing and an unreliable schedule.
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Canada's payroll system: 'an incomprehensible failure of project management'.
- 2018 QA-0078OAG Canada · Report
Building and Implementing the Phoenix Pay System (Auditor General of Canada, Spring 2018, Report 1)
Canada's Auditor General called Phoenix an 'incomprehensible failure of project management and oversight': the federal payroll system launched in 2016 without full testing or a pilot, and key functions were cut to protect the schedule.
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When the failed system is an algorithm and the cost falls on citizens.
- 2023 QA-0080Robodebt RC · Report
Report of the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme (2023)
Australia's Royal Commission into an automated welfare-debt scheme that used income averaging to raise unlawful debts against hundreds of thousands of people.
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Twenty years, $145 billion, and a final report whose website no longer exists.
- 2021 QA-0075SIGAR · Report
What We Need to Learn: Lessons from Twenty Years of Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR-21-46-LL)
SIGAR's final lessons-learned report, published as Kabul fell.
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