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The Department of Defense (DoD) constructs, operates, and maintains a large number of facilities. DoD incorporates life-cycle cost-effective practices into many aspects of the military planning and construction processes. This report provides RAND’s description and assessment of the process used to obtain life-cycle cost-effective facilities and how that affects DoD construction options and choices.

Employment among 16-19 year-olds declined from about 41% in 2000 to 28% in 2013. Research regarding the possible negative effects of this is mixed: there is a significant literature on how working as a teenager affects later employment outcomes, but it is far from definitive. This dissertation builds a teenage labor market model and presents evidence regarding five different hypotheses for this decline in employment. These are: a reduction in the supply of teenage labor stemming from increased returns to education; decreased demand for teenage labor due to increased competition from immigrants; decreased demand for teenage labor due to increased competition from less-skilled workers; decreased demand for teenage labor due to increased competition from adult workers in general; and minimum wages that are increasingly binding. I find mixed evidence, with the strongest evidence in favor of lower supply due to higher returns to education. There is also evidence that demand for teenage labor has fallen, with a small amount of evidence specifically supporting the hypothesis that adult immigrants are increasingly competing with teenagers. Because the evidence for the importance of working as a teenager on later employment outcomes and contribution to family finances is weak, public policy should not focus on getting teenagers in general to work. Instead, youth employment programs should focus specifically on the subset of teenagers who are disengaged from work and school. These teenagers differ in a variety of ways from their more-engaged peers. Among existing programs, there is significant variance in both degree of targeting and the extent to which program evaluation is occurring. The low-hanging fruit in terms of policy improvement is better evaluation of existing youth employment programs, with results informing funding.

This study on sexual orientation and U.S. military policy, requested by the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Secretary of Defense in order to weigh repeal of the \"Don't Ask, Don't Tell\" policy, examines public and military opinion on allowing gay men and lesbians to serve without restriction; research on sexual orientation, unit cohesion, and recruiting and retention; and experiences of domestic agencies and foreign militaries.

The Department of Defense (DoD) manages the largest facilities portfolio in the United States, including more than 400,000 buildings and structures worth more than $620 billion (DoD, 2013). The DoD military construction (MILCON) program is the primary process for constructing new facilities for the armed services and other DoD supporting functions. In fiscal year (FY) 2013, DoD budgeted about $9.6 billion for the MILCON program.¹ DoD will spend an additional $10.2 billion maintaining and reinvesting in its existing facilities through Sustainment, Restoration, and Modernization (SRM) and Demolition funding. These amounts have varied in recent years but, combined, generally represent 2

Given the funds required to design, construct, operate, and maintain DoD facilities, Congress has issued statutory and regulatory guidance on obtaining life-cycle cost-effective facilities, and it recently expressed concerns that DoD construction methods and techniques may not obtain the most life-cycle cost-effective facilities. Our report provides a description of the process that DoD uses to obtain life-cycle cost-effective facilities and how that process affects DoD construction options and choices. The focus of our report is how the incentives and barriers of various actors involved affect the overall objective of obtaining life-cycle cost-effective facilities. DoD, through its written design and acquisition

The life cycle of a DoD facility generally consists of planning, programming, design, construction, operation, maintenance, renovation, and decommissioning. In this chapter, we describe the points in a facility’s life cycle at which barriers to life-cycle cost-effectiveness might arise. To determine the possible barriers to obtaining life-cycle cost-effective facilities, we first characterized the major steps in obtaining and operating DoD facilities that influence costs, shown in Figure 2.1, and then examined the different entities, roles, and incentives associated with each step. We did this through our interviews and analysis of literature on the MILCON process.¹ The process generally begins at