The Fixing America's Surface Transportation (FAST) Act, which was enacted in December 2015, made a number of significant changes to the Railroad Rehabilitation and Improvement Financing (RRIF) program, but the Department of Transportation (DOT) and the modal administration that is responsible for the program, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), are still in the early stages of implementing

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' (Corps) backlog list of authorized water resources construction projects is incomplete because the agency does not track all authorized projects and the list does not include studies. Specifically, GAO found that the backlog does not include some projects that were authorized but were not appropriated funds. Corps headquarters officials said that the agency does

From fiscal years 2007 through 2010, the Emergency Relief Program received about $2.3 billion, of which $1.9 billion came from three supplemental appropriations compared with about $400 million authorized from the Highway Trust Fund. FHWA allocated this funding to 42 states and 3 territories to reduce the backlog of funding requests, with $485 million in unfunded requests remaining as of June 201

At over 60 percent of the 239 nonfederal NPL sites with unacceptable or unknown human exposure, all or more than half of the work remains to complete the remedial construction phase of cleanup, according to EPA regional officials. By the end of fiscal year 2009, EPA had expended $3 billion on the 75 sites with unacceptable human exposure and $1.2 billion on the 164 sites with unknown exposure. De

ESG grantees and subgrantees we visited in four states performed a range of administrative activities, but the ESG program's allowance for administrative costs--currently 5 percent--did not fully cover the cost of these activities. Grantees generally focused their administrative activities on awarding subgrants and monitoring subgrantee performance, while subgrantees focused their administrative

The Army set goals to reduce its estimated construction costs by 15 percent and building timelines by 30 percent, but it did not monitor goal achievement and thus did not know to what extent the goals had been met or whether changes made to its military construction program resulted in actual reductions in facility costs. GAO's review of selected project information showed that the Army did reduc

In summary, (1) The federal government provided an estimated $166.9 billion over the 3-year period from fiscal years 2006-2008--for an average of $55.6 billion per year--to administer 151 different federal K-12 and early childhood education programs. (2) Federal K-12 and early childhood education programs have a variety of goals, although serving disadvantaged populations was cited most frequentl

Since 2003, CDEs have made NMTC investments in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, with about 65 percent for real estate. NMTCs are often used as "gap financing," accounting for a portion of total project costs. NMTC investments in low-income community businesses generally use leveraged structures, where equity is left in the businesses, or subsidized interest rate structure

The EAS program has changed relatively little in 30 years, but current conditions raise concerns about whether the program can continue to operate as it has. Over the past 2 years subsidies to carriers have been increasing, along with EAS program obligations to fund those subsidies. In response, the administration is requesting $175 million for the EAS program in fiscal year 2010, a $50 million i

Utilization of TRA grants has been limited--VA had processed nine TRA grants from the date of the program's creation on June 15, 2006, through February 28, 2009. The dollar amount of the nine TRA grants VA has processed ranged from $3,575 to $14,000, and five of the nine grants were for the maximum amount of $14,000. All nine grants were for SAH-TRA, meaning that all nine grantees suffered from o