Washington, D.C. – Today, Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Chairman Vic Snyder (D-Ark.) and Ranking Member Rob Wittman (R-Va.) convened a hearing to review recent efforts to improve the Defense Travel System for the hundreds of thousands who have to use it and to simplify the laws and Department of Defense rules that regulate official travel.

 

Remarking on the current state of the system Chairman Snyder said, “Our men and women in uniform, and the civilians who support them, deserve an easy-to-use and efficient system for booking their travel and getting reimbursed. This committee wants to support the efforts of the Department to simplify its travel rules, but cannot act until we receive DOD’s legislative proposals. I encourage the Department of Defense to submit these legislative proposals to the Armed Services Committee as soon as possible.”

 

Ranking Member Wittman said, “After a year of work since our last hearing on this issue, I am pleased to see that DTS has made some progress.  We discovered here today that the remaining challenge is no less than restructuring our defense related travel laws.  I urge the Department to provide the committee recommendations for change without further delay.”

 

Witnesses at today’s hearing included Ms. Pam Mitchell, Director of the Defense Travel Management Office, and Mr. David Fisher, Director of Business Transformation Agency at the Department of Defense. The witnesses testified on the Department of Defense’s “defense travel simplification” process, the aim of which is to reduce duplicative and otherwise unnecessary regulations to make booking and managing defense travel more efficient, as well as efforts made in the past year to improve the user-friendliness of the computer-based Defense Travel System.

 

The hearing was the third annual hearing conducted by the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee on this issue, and was part of the Subcommittee’s ongoing oversight of efforts to improve a system used every day by hundreds of thousands of the Department’s civilians and uniformed personnel and which consumes over $10 billion per year in DOD resources.

 

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