In fiscal year 1986, Congress directed DOD to destroy the U.S. stockpile of lethal chemical agents and munitions. DOD designated the Department of the Army as its executive agent for the program, and the Army established the Chemical Demilitarization (or Chem-Demil) Program, which was charged with the destruction of the stockpile at nine storage sites. Incineration was selected as the method to destroy the stockpile. In 1988, the Chemical Stockpile Emergency Preparedness Program (CSEPP) was created to enhance the emergency management and response capabilities of communities near the storage sites in case of an accident; the Army and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) jointly managed the program. In 1997, consistent with congressional direction, the Army and FEMA clarified their CSEPP roles by implementing a management structure under which FEMA assumed responsibility for off-post (civilian community) program activities, while the Army continued to manage on-post chemical emergency preparedness. The Army provides CSEPP funding to FEMA, which is administered via grants to the states and counties near where stockpile sites are located in order to carry out the program’s off-post activities. Agent destruction began in 1990 at Johnston Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. Subsequently, Congress directed DOD to evaluate the possibility of using alternative technologies to incineration. In 1994, the Army initiated a project to develop nonincineration technologies for use at the two bulk-agent only sites at Aberdeen, Maryland, and Newport, Indiana. These sites were selected in part because their stockpiles were relatively simple—each site had only one type of agent and this agent was stored in bulk-agent (ton) containers. In 1997, DOD approved pilot testing of a neutralization technology at these two sites. Also in 1997, Congress directed DOD to evaluate the use of alternative technologies and suspended incineration planning activities at two sites with assembled weapons in Pueblo, Colorado, and Blue Grass, Kentucky. Furthermore, Congress directed that these two sites be managed in a program independent of the Army’s Chem-Demil Program and report to DOD instead of the Army. Thus, the Assembled Chemical Weapons Assessment (ACWA) program was established. The nine sites, the types of agent, and the percentage of the original stockpiles are shown in table 1. In 1997, the United States ratified the CWC, which prohibits the use of these weapons and mandates the elimination of existing stockpiles by April 29, 2007. A CWC provision allows that extensions of up to 5 years can be granted. The CWC also contains a series of interim deadlines applicable to the U.S. stockpile (see table 2). The United States met the 1 percent interim deadline in September 1997 and the 20 percent interim deadline in July 2001. As of June 2003, the Army was reporting that a total of about 26 percent of the original stockpile had been destroyed. Three other countries (referred to as states parties)—India, Russia, and one other country—have declared chemical weapons stockpiles and are required to destroy them in accordance with CWC deadlines as well. As of April 2003, two of these three countries (India and one other country) had met the 1 percent interim deadline to destroy their stockpiles. Of the three countries, only India met the second (20 percent) interim deadline to destroy its stockpile by April 2002. However, Russia, with the largest declared stockpile—over 40,000 tons— did not meet the 1 percent or the 20 percent interim deadlines, and only began destroying its stockpile in December 2002. In 2001, Russia requested a 5-year extension to the 2007 deadline. Russia did destroy 1 percent of its stockpile by April 2003, although it is doubtful that it will meet the 2012 deadline if granted. Traditionally, management and oversight responsibilities for the Chem-Demil Program reside primarily within three levels at DOD—the Under Secretary of Defense (Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics) who is the Defense Acquisition Executive for the Secretary of Defense, the Assistant Secretary of the Army (Acquisition, Logistics, Technology) who is the Army Acquisition Executive for the Army, and the Program Manager for Chemical Demilitarization—because it is a major defense acquisition program. In addition to these offices, since August 2002, the Deputy Assistant to the Secretary of Defense (Chemical Demilitarization and Threat Reduction), has served as the focal point responsible for oversight, coordination, and integration of the Chem-Demil Program. In May 2001, in response to program cost, schedule, and management concerns, milestone decision authority was elevated to the Under Secretary of Defense (Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics). DOD stated that this change would streamline future decision making and increase program oversight. DOD indicated that the change was also consistent with the size and scope of the program, international treaty obligations, and the level of local, state, and federal interest in the safe and timely destruction of the chemical stockpile. In September 2001, after more than a yearlong review, DOD revised the program’s schedule milestones for seven of the nine sites and the cost estimates for all nine sites. These milestones represent the target dates that each site is supposed to meet for the completion of critical phases of the project. The phases include design, construction, systemization, operations, and closure. (Appendix II describes these phases and provides the status of each site.) The 2001 revision marked the third time the program extended its schedule milestones and cost estimates since it became a major defense acquisition program in 1994. The 2001 revision also pushed the milestones for most sites several years beyond the previous 1998 schedule milestones and, for the first time, beyond the April 2007 deadline contained in the CWC. Table 3 compares the 1998 and 2001 schedule milestones for starting and finishing agent destruction operations at the eight sites with chemical agent stockpiles in 2001. The planned agent destruction completion date at some sites was extended over 5 years. DOD extended the schedule milestones to reflect the Army’s experience at the two sites—Johnston Atoll and Tooele—that had begun the destruction process prior to 2001. It found that previous schedule milestones had been largely based on overly optimistic engineering estimates. Lower destruction rates stipulated by environmental regulators, and increased time needed to change the facility’s configuration when switching between different types of chemical agents and weapons, meant destruction estimates needed to be lengthened. Moreover, experience at Johnston Atoll, which began closure activities in 2000, revealed that previous closure estimates for other sites had been understated. In addition, DOD’s Cost Analysis Improvement Group modified the site schedules based on a modeling technique that considered the probabilities of certain schedule activities taking longer than anticipated. In particular, the group determined that the operations phase, where agent destruction takes place, has the highest probability for schedule delays and lengthened that phase the most. Because the costs of the program are directly related to the length of the schedule, DOD also increased the projected life-cycle costs, from $15 billion in 1998 to $24 billion in 2001 (see fig. 1). In December 2001, after the program schedule and costs were revised, the Army transferred primary program oversight from the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army (Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology) to the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army (Installations and Environment). According to the Army, this move streamlined responsibilities for the program, which were previously divided between these two offices. In January 2003, the Army reassigned oversight responsibilities to the Assistant Secretary of the Army (Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology) for all policy and direction for the Chem-Demil Program and CSEPP. The Secretary of the Army also directed the Assistant Secretary of the Army (Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology) and the Commanding General, U.S. Army Materiel Command, to jointly establish an agency to perform the chemical demilitarization as well as the chemical weapons storage functions. In response to this directive, the Army announced the creation of a new organization—the Chemical Materials Agency (CMA)—which will merge the demilitarization and the storage functions. During this transition process, the Program Manager for Chemical Demilitarization was redesignated as the Program Manager for the Elimination of Chemical Weapons and will report to the Director of CMA and have responsibility for each site through the systemization phase. The Director for Operations will manage the operations and closure phases. As of June 2003, the Program Manager for the Elimination of Chemical Weapons was providing day-to-day management for the sites at Anniston, Umatilla, Newport, and Pine Bluff; the Director for Operations was providing day-to-day management for the sites at Tooele, Aberdeen, and Johnston Atoll, and the Program Manager, ACWA, was managing the sites at Pueblo and Blue Grass. Since 1990, we have issued a number of reports that have focused on management, cost, and schedule issues related to the Chem-Demil Program. For example, in a 1995 testimony we cited the possibility of further cost growth and schedule slippage due to environmental requirements, public opposition to the baseline incineration process, and lower than expected disposal rates. We also testified that weaknesses in financial management and internal control systems have hampered program results and alternative technologies were unlikely to mature enough to meet CWC deadlines. In 1995, we noted that the emergency preparedness program had been slow to achieve results and that communities were not fully prepared to respond to a chemical emergency. In 1997, we found high-level management attention was needed at the Army and FEMA to clearly define management roles and responsibilities.