Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., chairman of the House Homeland Security panel, took note of the 65-page GAO report questioning management of SBInet. "After reading the GAO assessment of SBInet, it seems that the department's scattershot approach of issuing different, interdependent simultaneous task orders leaves the program vulnerable to collapsing on itself, like a house of cards," he said in a statement.

Earlier in the month, U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, warned in a Feb. 8 hearing that SBInet could be subject to waste and abuse, given how the Department of Homeland Security is relying on Boeing and private contractors to design, build and even conduct oversight of the project.

"There seems to be no task too important to be outsourced to private contractors," Waxman said. More than half of the 98 staff members hired by DHS to oversee the new SBInet contract are private contractors, he said, and some of them work for companies that are business partners of Boeing, the company the staff members are overseeing, he said.

The GAO said DHS needs to tighten oversight and accountability of SBInet with "explicit and measureable commitments" for costs and schedule. The GAO also said the actual SBInet contract should include a maximum quantity beyond the unclear statement of funding for "6,000 miles of secure U.S. border." Waxman put the Boeing contract's value at $30 billion in a statement issued at the Feb. 8 hearing.

Officials from Boeing and DHS testified before the two committees and have partly addressed the concerns raised by the congressional leaders and the GAO. Regarding the ultimate costs, the DHS repeated its "6,000 miles of secure U.S. border" upper limit to GAO, and a DHS spokesman reiterated that language in an interview Thursday.