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This report describes gender-based/sexual and race/ethnicity-based harassment and discrimination at the Federal Emergency Management Agency. About one in five employees experienced at least one civil rights violation in the year preceding the survey.

Researchers from the Homeland Security Operational Analysis Center have developed a methodology for understanding and prioritizing cybersecurity risk in election infrastructure to assist state and local election officials.

This report is a compendium of expert insights regarding opportunities for investing in science and technology to increase U.S. ability to engage in long-term competition in undergoverned spaces.

Researchers developed cost-estimating tools and estimated future construction costs for Puerto Rico's recovery from Hurricane María. This report documents their approach, data, findings, and recommendations.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) increasingly seeks fixed-price contracts for Public Assistance expenditures to help communities rebuild after disaster. FEMA and those communities have large incentives to estimate costs correctly before contracts are signed. One challenge to providing an accurate estimate of construction costs is that the cost of rebuilding can be affected by the reconstruction effort itself. One way to account for such changes is to use a future price forecast (FPF) factor, which adjusts a project's cost estimate to account for overall price-level increases caused by a disaster. The purpose of this study was to help FEMA identify when to use an FPF. To carry out the study, the authors convened panels of experts to discuss scenarios of hypothetical disasters-in particular, how these disasters could affect local economies. They also tested a variety of community and disaster-related measures that might be predictive of large cost increases and explored the relationship between different types of skills and labor-mobility variables and disaster effects on construction costs. They then estimated how often disasters cause large increases in construction costs and identified criteria to use in determining when an FPF might be warranted. They also explored the implications of these criterion thresholds by estimating FPFs in some what-if scenarios.

Improving the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) acquisition system-the management and development processes by which the department acquires, develops, and sustains weapon systems, automated information systems, and services-has been an issue of sustained interest to policymakers since the beginning of the military establishment. Numerous actions have been initiated and implemented over decades to rein in the increasing life-cycle costs and to ensure a timely delivery of these systems to meet U.S. security needs. In this report, researchers describe overarching trends that affect the defense acquisition system, outline challenges in DoD's defense acquisition process, and suggest improvements that might help address those challenges. The study is informed by open-source documents and insights from publicly available RAND Corporation research on defense acquisition, especially reports published since 1986, when a similar review of RAND research was published.

Several U.S. Army resources and policies work together to produce recruits. The authors present a model--the Reserve Recruiting Resource Model--designed to optimize resources and policies to achieve future Army Reserve recruiting goals.

Over the past decade, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) has evolved its programming organization multiple times, along with the process it uses for managing its resource investments. Each of these iterations was done to address challenges and inefficiencies. NGA is now considering additional steps to improve its process and is seeking to improve its practices through internal improvements, such as gaining an understanding of how previous changes affected the overall effectiveness of its resource management process, and what can be learned from other organizations. NGA is now entering a fourth period of acquisition restructuring that is intended to improve on how the planning and programming phases are managed. NGA asked the RAND Corporation to review the programming phase of the Intelligence Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Evaluation (IPPBE) process. The authors looked at three organizational eras (pre-2013, 2013-2018, and 2018 to the present) to determine the conditions, causes, and effects of performance and effectiveness generally and of previous changes to this phase of NGA IPPBE for each era. NGA is not alone in its ongoing effort to modernize its IPPBE structure to improve efficiency and effectiveness. Although NGA has conducted several previous internal studies to identify areas for IPPBE process improvement, this research is the first to synthesize findings between external literature and findings gleaned from structured subject-matter expert interviews to highlight crucial program-process issues for NGA leadership to absorb and address in any future IPPBE restructuring phase.

The authors examined how the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has programmed its resources, focusing on the reasons for changes over time and the results of the changes.

Getting early indication of potential contractor performance risks and contract execution issues is critical for proactive acquisition management. When contractors are in danger of not meeting contractual performance goals, Department of the Air Force (DAF) acquisition management may not be fully aware of the shortfall until, for example, a schedule deadline is missed, government testing indicates poor system's technical performance, or costs exceed expectations. Concerns continue to be raised about cost and schedule growth in acquisition and experts postulate about a lack of knowledge about the status of acquisition programs. In this report, the authors focus on metrics to identify emerging execution problems earlier than traditional acquisition oversight systems to enable more-proactive risk and performance management. They summarize their findings, which include a taxonomy of contractor relative risks, leading indicators of performance, relevant data sources, risk measures and equations, and a prototype that implements some of these findings using real data sources. This research should be of interest to acquisition professionals and leadership who are searching for ways to improve acquisition performance through early identification of potential relative contractor risks and execution problems to inform active program management and mitigation of risks. The prototype should be of interest to acquisition officials (from program managers to milestone decision authorities) to help them access more data in an easy-to-understand way so they can focus their limited time on areas that require increased management attention. This approach should be useful during any phase of the acquisition process.

This report examines U.S. structures and processes for non-cyber emergency management and whether U.S. officials can learn from these other incidents to help public and private sector stakeholders improve preparations for response to cyber incidents.

Through analyses involving the Air Force's Tier 1 fitness assessment (FA), the authors examine whether FA components meet their intended purpose to minimize health risks and maximize readiness of airmen.

This report presents results from a systematic review and meta-analyses of research examining how mindfulness meditation affects 13 performance-related outcomes of interest to the U.S. Army and broader military.

The authors identified ten standards for the delivery of high-quality care for veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, substance use disorders, and mild traumatic brain injury.

This report presents findings from a study designed to identify the long-term outcomes of traumatic brain injury for veterans, the future needs of this population, effective treatments, and the availability of community-based resources.