WASHINGTON, September 22 — The Government Accountability Office has found that the Pentagon cannot reliably demonstrate the cost savings it claims from a fast-growing class of shared-services agreements with state, local and tribal governments, according to a Congressional Research Service report examined by Legis1 Editorial and published on September 16. Intergovernmental support agreements, or IGSAs, let military installations receive, provide or share support services — utilities and road maintenance among them — with non-federal public partners. Federal law authorised the military services to enter into such agreements in 2013.
Use has grown briskly since: from 45 installations in 2018 to 316 in 2025, based on GAO analysis of data as of December 2025.
The technical reality of the numbers
Under the hood, the GAO’s problem is not the agreements themselves but the arithmetic behind them. Military-service cost-savings estimates did not reflect best practices for cost estimation, the GAO found, and some agreements carried no associated cost estimates or cost-benefit analyses at all. The Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force lacked procedures to verify installation cost and cost-savings estimates, or to revise them when necessary.
Service guidance, meanwhile, offered no specific instructions for estimating costs and savings on prospective IGSAs that would provide multiple services to one or more installations. Officials from the Department of Defense, the Army, the Navy and selected installations told the GAO they intend to promote future IGSA use.
The GAO made five recommendations covering cost estimation, savings estimation, and verification of actual costs and savings. The Army, Navy and Air Force generally agreed with recommendations to improve task-order cost guidance, while the listed recommendations for those services remained open because responsive actions had not yet been taken or were still being planned.
Where the wage comparison bites
In the sampled agreements, public partners in nine of 21 single-installation IGSAs used private contractors for some or all of the work. That matters because of a legal gap. The McNamara-O’Hara Service Contract Act requires employees providing services to the federal government to receive prevailing wage rates for comparable employees in their locality, but the law does not apply to IGSAs.
The GAO compared minimum wages for five selected positions under IGSAs with minimum wages that might be required for comparable work under the act, using a nongeneralizable sample. For the selected paralegal position, the public-partner minimum hourly wage was $23.92, against $28.89 under the comparable Service Contract Act wage — a 17 percent difference.
For the selected Driver I position, $15.36 against $18.98, a 19 percent difference. For the selected EMT transport crewmember position, $16.37 against $18.84, a 13 percent difference. For the selected senior accounting/payroll specialist position, $21.47 against $21.54, a 0 percent difference.
For the selected stormwater environmental specialist 1 position, $39.84 against $26.64, a 50 percent difference, with the public-partner wage higher. As ever, the detail that matters is the direction of travel.
The report frames the central issue as not whether these agreements can be used, but whether the services can demonstrate that projected costs and savings are sound before expanding them. Watch the five open recommendations. Until the services close them, the growth curve from 45 installations to 316 rests on estimates the GAO says nobody has yet verified.
