Radiation detectionTroubled radiation screening program gets additional $300 million
The Advanced Spectroscopic Portal (ASP) procurement program has hit another snag in its short-lived, yet troubled life; a recent unreleased Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that DHS plans to spend more than $300 million dollars to purchase several hundred ASPs, radiation detection equipment, that has not been fully tested and may not even work at all
The Advanced Spectroscopic Portal (ASP) procurement program has hit another snag in its short-lived, yet troubled life.
A recent unreleased Government Accountability Office (GAO)found that DHS plans to spend more than $300 million dollars to purchase several hundred ASPs, radiation detection equipment, that has not been fully tested and may not even work at all.
The program began in 2006 under the George W. Bush administration with the goal of developing a way to prevent terrorists from smuggling radioactive materials in shipping containers that can be later be used in a dirty bomb.
In a report released in January, the National Academy of Sciences found that there was no way to determine if the ASPs would function as promised. More damningly, the academy found that DHS’s Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO) presented its findings before Congress “in ways that are incorrect and potentially misleading.”
Before the release of the report, DHS said that it planned to abandon the program due to such questions, yet according to the DNDO’s latest budget request, it plans on purchasing as many as 400 ASPs by 2016.
According to the latest GAO report, the budget request comes despite the fact that DNDO has not fulfilled internal requirements to conduct an independent review of the machines before purchasing them. In addition the agency has no plans to independently test or evaluate the ASPs.
Without an assessment, the department lacks “the input it needs to determine whether ASP is ready to progress toward production and deployment. This is especially important, given that program’s troubled history,” said the GAO report.
DHS officials agreed with the report’s findings but have not scheduled any tests for the machines.
The program was initially given $1.2 billion in funding, but most recently the Obama administration said that it would sharply scale back the program due to numerous problems. GAO investigators and congressional overseers found that DNDO had underestimated the ASP’s costs, overstated its benefits, and provided misleading information to Congress.
Despite all this, in February the DHS budget document said that the agency planned to purchase “between 300 and 400 ASP systems” for secondary screening.
