Saving the Government Money: Recent Examples from RAND's Federally Funded Research and Development Centers

The RAND Corporations three defense-based federally funded research and development centers FFRDCs help the government organizations responsible for U.S. national security meet challenges that call for both a sustained analytic attention from multidisciplinary teams over many years and b rock-solid trust engendered by rigorous safeguards against conflict of interest. Through their enduring collaboration with defense policymakers, the three FFRDCs at RAND see box have developed unsurpassed expertise, or research capital, on issues of defense policy and its interrelated technological, operational, and financial dimensions. Often, the FFRDCs apply this research capital by helping their Department of Defense DoDsponsors save the government money while solving national security problems. The table on page 2 lists illustrative projects that have helped save the government money or have the potential to do so. Subsequent pages contain summaries of the projects. When publicly accessible documents are available, their references and links also appear.These projects are representative of numerous RAND analyses that have been conducted within the FFRDCs and have yielded similar benefits over the years. Together, the analyses account for billions of dollars in savings and cost avoidance.