Senator: Pull Plug on Defense Travel System A Senate subcommittee chairman said the Defense Department must give up on its Defense Travel System for booking trips or he will sponsor legislation to cut off funding. “The travel component of DTS is a failure and a waste of taxpayers’ money,” said Sen. Norm Coleman, a Minnesota Republican who heads the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. He said investigations by the subcommittee, the DOD inspector general and the Government Accountability Office found that department personnel used the system to book only 17% of their trips. “This subcommittee has discovered that travel agents who work with DTS on a daily basis uniformly agree that the system is inefficient, incomplete and costly,” he said at a Nov. 16 hearing. One travel agent told the committee it takes a DOD employee using DTS thirty minutes to arrange a trip that a travel agent could handle in five minutes. GAO said the system, operated by Northrop Grumman, has cost the department $474 million since 1998. DOD projects savings of $56 million a year, but when GAO investigators asked the department to justify that figure, DOD officials produced an American Express news release as their proof, “DTS’ projected cost savings are in fact based on a false premise,” Coleman said. “that you can generate savings by transferring the responsibility to select flights, hotels and rental cars from professional travel agents to DOD travelers and pay the travel agents a lower fee. This would be the same as directing all DOD personnel to speak Arabic in order to save money on translation services.” Subcommittee member Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican, said he will also move to block any further funding for the system. David Chu, undersecretary of Defense for personnel and readiness, told the subcommittee DOD is not satisfied with DTS and is exploring options to fix it. Congress has ordered an independent study of the system. The incoming chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Michigan Democrat Carl Levin, said he will wait for the results of the study before deciding what to do.