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GAO-26-109162 1 (August 12, 2026)

handle is hein.gao/propn0001 and id is 1 raw text is: U.S. GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY OFFICE 441 G St. N.W. Acting Comptroller General Washington, DC 20548 of the United States August 12, 2026 The Honorable Jared Isaacman Administrator National Aeronautics and Space Administration 300 Hidden Figures Way SW Washington DC 20546 Priority Open Recommendations: National Aeronautics and Space Administration Dear Administrator Isaacman: The purpose of this letter is to call your personal attention to three areas where open recommendations to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) should be given high priority. In January 2026, we reported that, on a government-wide basis, 77 percent of our recommendations made 5 years ago were implemented.1 NASA's recommendation implementation rate was 72 percent. As of July 2026, NASA has 46 open recommendations, including four priority recommendations.2 Since our August 2025 letter, NASA has not implemented any priority recommendations.3 Fully implementing these open priority recommendations could significantly improve NASA's operations. We are highlighting the following areas that warrant your timely and focused attention: • Monitoring program costs. NASA needs to improve transparency into Artemis program and mission costs. Artemis missions, which aim to return astronauts to the moon and eventually Mars, are composed of some of NASA's most expensive and complex projects. We recommended that if NASA continued to fly the Space Launch System Block I beyond the first two missions, it should establish separate life-cycle cost and schedule baseline estimates for those efforts, to include funding for operations and sustainment, and report this information annually to Congress via the agency's budget submission. At the mission level, NASA has not taken steps to create a life-cycle cost estimate for the Artemis Ill mission, 1GAO, Performance and Accountability Report, Fiscal Year2025, GAO-26-900644 (Washington, D.C.: Jan. 29, 2026). 2GAO considers a recommendation to be a priority if when implemented, it may significantly improve government operations, for example, by realizing large dollar savings; eliminating mismanagement, fraud, and abuse; or making progress toward addressing a high-risk or duplication issue. 3GAO, Priority Open Recommendations: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, GAO-25-108199 (Washington, D.C.: Aug. 28, 2025). In this letter, we identified three priority recommendations. Since then, we added one new priority recommendation. GAO-26-109162 NASA Priority Recommendations Page 1