The Pentagon has reviewed only 4 of its 27 defense agencies and DOD field activities since 2018 and never reported the results to Congress, according to a Government Accountability Office report dated September 3, 2026. GAO issued four open recommendations and said the department provided no written comments on the findings.
What did GAO actually find?
The report, Defense Management: DOD Needs to Review Its Defense Agencies and Field Activities for Efficiency and Effectiveness (GAO-26-107781), states plainly that DOD "has not recently met statutory requirements to review and report on the efficiency and effectiveness of its defense agencies and DOD field activities." Between April 2023 and September 2024, the department reviewed four of the 27 organizations but, per GAO, "did not finalize the reports based on its reviews or submit the reports to Congress as required."
GAO traced the failure to process, not to a single office. DOD lacked formalized guidance, such as a written instruction, when it ran the reviews. A May 2026 memorandum assigned responsibilities and deadlines, but GAO noted that an earlier memo had already failed to ensure the reviews were completed. The watchdog also found the department "did not clearly define measures to be used for its most recent DAFA reviews," which prevented any meaningful judgment about efficiency or effectiveness.
Why do these reviews matter to Congress?
Defense agencies and DOD field activities — known as DAFAs — are the Pentagon's shared-service and support organizations, and the law requires each to be examined on a fixed cycle. GAO's report states that "DOD is required to conduct reviews of each DAFA's efficiency and effectiveness at least once every 4 years." When the reviews lapse, committees lose their main documented instrument for judging whether agencies such as the Defense Logistics Agency are duplicating work done elsewhere.
GAO identified concrete overlap in two training areas: leader development programs at the Defense Human Resources Agency, the Defense Logistics Agency, and Washington Headquarters Services, and sexual assault prevention and response training developed separately by DOD and the military services. The department "has not assessed if there are negative effects on efficiency or effectiveness resulting from this overlap," the report says.
Where does this fit in GAO's wider Pentagon ledger?
The September report lands on top of a large backlog of unimplemented watchdog guidance. A GAO letter published July 28, 2026 and covered by Legis1 found the Department of Defense "has 53 unimplemented priority recommendations among 1,567 open GAO recommendations overall." Of the 79 priority recommendations in the previous annual letter, the department implemented 17, GAO dropped 16 from the priority list, and seven were added — netting out to 53.
GAO designates recommendations as priority items when acting on them could yield major savings, improve decision-making, or curb mismanagement. The open priority items span military readiness, weapons acquisition, and financial management — a reminder that the DAFA review failure reported in September 2026 is one entry in a much longer accountability ledger that Congress, not the department, keeps tallying.
