POGO Preserves Hidden DOT&E Operational Testing Documents

On July 30, the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) removed links to annual reports going back 25 years. At some point, links to related lists of programs overseen by DOT&E (known as “Oversight Lists”) also became less accessible to the public. Created by Congress in 1983, DOT&E assesses the combat readiness of weapons before they’re put into mass production. The office then reports those findings to Congress and the public. The removal of DOT&E’s annual reports appears to violate federal laws.

This seems to be the latest in a pattern of undermining public access to DOT&E, as we warned recently, and in 2022 and 2018. This comes alongside an apparent effort to limit the ability of DOT&E to do its job, as we warned a year ago, when DOT&E reduced the number of programs it was overseeing from 251 to 152 after its staff was cut by more than half. We are glad to see some legislators, such as Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Representative Donald Norcross (D-NJ), pressing Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to reverse this trend.

The Department of Defense (DOD) issued a statement describing the removal as “a proactive measure designed to strengthen U.S. operational security posture.” Despite this, as of August 17, the annual reports and oversight lists remained accessible on the same DOD website, even though links to them had been removed. To ensure the public continues to have ready access to these important documents, we have made them available via links provided below.

As described in a recent POGO analysis, DOT&E plays a crucial role in ensuring our troops have effective equipment. It is required by law to test whether weapons are combat ready before mass production. Before the establishment of DOT&E, weapons systems such as the M16 rifle were given to troops without adequate testing and failed in combat.

DOT&E is also required by law to provide an annual report to Congress that “is unclassified and does not require safeguarding or dissemination controls.” Another statute requires that the Pentagon make any “report that is required by law to be submitted to Congress by the Secretary of Defense, or by any element of the Department of Defense” … “available to the public by … posting the report on a publicly accessible Internet website of the Department of Defense.” It is not clear how any desire to “strengthen U.S. operational security posture” could override these statutory requirements.

According to the Internet Archive, as recently as May 14, the Publications web page for DOT&E displayed a link to the latest oversight list and a dropdown menu listing every annual report since the year 2000.

The current DOT&E Publications page removes the Annual Reports menu entirely and includes only a link to the current oversight list that requires a Common Access Card, which limits access to certain military, government, and contractor personnel.

While removing these links makes it harder to access these documents, many of them remain accessible if one already knows the address of individual documents or can discover them via online search engines. Because DOT&E’s annual reports are issued once per year, there is only one document to find per year. But because oversight lists are issued on an ad hoc basis, it is more difficult to know whether one has found all of them. The tables below provide links to all the documents POGO has found and whether we found them on the DOT&E website or elsewhere.

We hope this repository of key DOT&E reports will be useful to the public, journalists, and congressional staff as we continue to support efforts to restore DOT&E’s capacity to conduct its important work and the public’s access to its findings.