Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "In April 2001, we reported that the Army Materiel Command's guidance required that 50 percent of the excess conventional ammunition demilitarization budget--a figure for which we did not find any analytical basis--be set aside for commercial firms that use environmentally friendly demilitarization processes. This resulted in the retention and underutilization of environmentally friendly demilitarization capabilities at government facilities and in additional program costs. We thus recommended that the Department of Defense (DOD) develop a plan in consultation with Congress that included procedures for assessing the appropriate mix of government and commercial sector capacity needed to demilitarize excess ammunition. Our intent was to have DOD reexamine the cost-effectiveness of using commercial versus government facilities to demilitarize excess ammunition. Over the past several months we have conducted work to determine the specific actions taken to implement our recommendation. We made extensive use of our prior work as a baseline to compare the changes in demilitarization capacity and utilization at government-owned facilities since our prior report. We conducted our analysis of DOD's demilitarization program in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards. The purpose of this letter is to note that …

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Section 202 of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Authorization Act of 2000 (P.L. 106-391) requires that GAO verify NASA's accounting for amounts obligated against established limits for the space station and related space shuttle support. Under the act, obligations are limited to $25 billion for the space station and $17.7 billion for shuttle support."