Donald Trump ended his previous term as president with a set of changes billed as streamlining the Defense Department’s cumbersome and costly procedures to develop and buy new weapons.

That fell short, according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office.

The Pentagon’s “efforts to increase the speed of delivery to the warfighter have yet to improve average delivery time for weapon system acquisitions,” the watchdog office said in a report released Thursday. The new framework was intended to scale back the average time from the start of a program to delivery of an initial capability for major new systems. That can now take a decade or more.

The report, titled “Military Departments Should Take Steps to Facilitate Speed and Innovation,” provides a cautionary note on the challenges that Trump, now president-elect, his incoming team at the Pentagon - and advisers including billionaire Elon Musk — will face despite their assurances to make the Pentagon more agile and cost-effective and shift its focus from old-line contractors to technology innovators.

The “Adaptive Acquisition Framework” introduced in January 2020, was described as “the most transformational acquisition policy change we have seen in decades” by then-Undersecretary Ellen Lord, who was the Pentagon’s chief buyer.

The dense but detailed GAO report is likely to be reviewed by advisers including Musk, a leader of Trump’s initiative to cut government costs and whose SpaceX is also a contractor for Pentagon satellite launches.

“We have to return accountability and blast through that bureaucracy that is holding up the kinds of innovations that we need,” Robert Wilkie, the leader of Trump’s transition team for the Pentagon, said last weekend on a panel at the Reagan National Defense Forum. “We’ve done it before. We can do it again.”

But Shelby Oakley, the GAO’s director of contracting and national security acquisition, said in a statement that “frankly, cost savings that the new administration and DoD seek will continue to remain elusive unless the services begin doing things differently.”

“Despite broad authority to implement policies and practices intended to ensure continuous innovation and speedy delivery of capability to the warfighter, the services have made little progress doing so beyond software programs,” she said. “For the most part, the services are approaching programs the same way and expecting different outcomes. This risks continuing to leave the warfighter holding the bag waiting for promised capability that will be outdated by the time it arrives.”

The 2020 framework laid out six acquisition “pathways” involving streamlining designs, validating them, prototyping and then producing them tailored to specific applications or end products - such as aircraft or updated software. One such pathway sought to fulfill urgent combat operational needs in less than two years, with development and production completed in months in order “to rapidly deliver useful capability to the warfighter.”

The report cites Air Force, Navy and Army examples that incorporated some elements of each pathway, but the results weren’t always obvious. The GAO recommended that the service secretaries revise their acquisition policies and “relevant guidance to reflect leading practices that facilitate speed and innovation.”