Recommendation: The Commissioner of CBP should clearly document the process and criteria for making decisions on funding non-owned operational requirements and communicate this process to Border Patrol sectors. (Recommendation 2)

Agency: Department of Homeland Security: United States Customs and Border Protection
Status: Open

Comments: In September 2017, CBP concurred with our recommendation and stated that it will use the Capability Gap Analysis Process to validate its access and mobility requirements on a national level. The national priorities will be determined through requirements planning at Border Patrol stations. CBP noted that it will outline the process and criteria for making decisions on funding for non-owned operational requirements and communicate this process to Border Patrol sectors. In November 2018, CBP reported that Border Patrol developed a prioritization process related to the order of wall deployments, which will be tailored to use in determining the priority order for road investments. According to CBP, priority order is to be determined based on the analysis of quantitative and qualitative data and the operational expertise of Border Patrol station, sector and national level leadership. The process was developed by USBP's Operational Requirements Management Division, communicated to southern border sectors, and executed to establish the priority deployment order of fiscal year 2018 new road requirements. Once the prioritization process has been refined, it will be expanded to also include the maintenance and repair on existing roads. In October 2019, CBP reported that it continues to work on enhancing the existing prioritization strategy, which includes exploring implementation of a new prioritization modeling tool and methodology. Discussions on how and if the model will be effective as a prioritization tool have been delayed due to several other internal priorities and external disruptions. Therefore, and based on leadership guidance, the prioritization strategy and methodology will be delayed. CBP officials reported in June 2020 that Border Patrol's Strategic Planning and Analysis Directorate Operational Requirements Management Division personnel will conduct data calls over the upcoming weeks with Tactical Infrastructure subject matter experts from the sectors and stations to validate existing road requirements and initiate the data collection for the prioritization process. Once the process is formalized, we will determine whether CBP's efforts fully address the intent of this recommendation.

Recommendation: To strengthen BLM's controls and reasonably assure accountability over mining law program expenditures, both payroll and nonpayroll, the Secretary of the Interior should direct the Director of the Bureau of Land Management to establish procedures for regular and timely communication to all BLM employees on policy and procedural changes affecting the mining law program's expenditure-related processes.

Agency: Department of the Interior
Status: Open

Comments: The Department of Interior's (DOI) Bureau of Land Management (BLM) agreed with our recommendation. In support of closing this recommendation, officials from BLM re-iterated their policy about sending updates regarding guidance changes, which is included in its directives handbook. They also provided us with an example of its timely communication to BLM employees to announce the issuance of its revised Fund Code Handbook. We reviewed the directives handbook and verified that it contains guidance for communicating policy and procedural changes affecting the mining law program's expenditure-related processes. While the guidance in the directives handbook is a good start towards meeting the intent of our recommendation, we communicated to BLM in fiscal year 2019 that the findings in the report were caused in part by inadequate communication processes and the accessibility of the guidance to staff. To address the recommendation, we would like to see evidence that BLM has established procedures to ensure proper communication of changes or policies to the staff using BLM guidance, which includes having written procedures on how BLM publishes updates or communicates policy information, where guidance should be published in BLM's internal page, and the BLM officials who are in charge of that process. In fiscal year 2020, we have sent additional follow-up questions to the agency and are currently waiting for a response. We will continue to monitor the agency's actions to address this recommendation.

Recommendation: To further improve its production verification efforts and to provide greater assurance that BLM staff are consistently applying the new guidance to commingling agreement requests and determine whether the guidance corrected deficiencies and produced improvements, the Secretary should direct BLM to schedule and complete the internal review as expeditiously as possible.

Agency: Department of the Interior
Status: Open

Comments: In July 2019, Interior officials stated BLM will not be conducting a separate internal review of the guidance for commingling agreement requests issued in July 2013. However, officials stated they are committed to performing the internal review as part of the internal review on its inspection and enforcement program and believed their pending actions related to implementing the recommendations in the GAO report "Oil and Gas Development: Actions Needed to Improve Oversight of the Inspection and Enforcement Program" (GAO-19-7) would also address this recommendation. Interior officials stated the target date for implementing this recommendation is June 30, 2021.

Recommendation: To develop an estimate of the scope of work remaining to address uranium contamination on or near the Navajo reservation, Congress should consider requiring that the Environmental Protection Agency take the lead and work with the other federal agencies to develop an overall estimate of the remaining scope of the work, time frames, and costs.

Agency: Congress
Status: Open

Comments: As of September 2020, we are not aware of any legislation being enacted to address this matter for congressional consideration.

Recommendation: In light of the problems BIA has encountered in managing the cleanup at the Tuba City Dump site, the Secretary of the Interior should direct the Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs to employ best practices in creating the schedule and cost estimates for the remedial action cleanup phase.

Agency: Department of the Interior
Status: Open

Comments: As of September 2020, BIA and EPA had selected a cleanup option for Tuba City Dump, but BIA had not created schedule or cost estimates for the cleanup action. BIA stated it anticipated completing the cleanup design, which will include cost and schedule estimates, by September 2022. GAO will assess BIA's actions once they are complete.

Recommendation: In light of the problems BIA has encountered in managing the cleanup at the Tuba City Dump site, the Secretary of the Interior should direct the Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs to identify and examine any lessons learned from managing the remedial investigation and feasibility study contract and consider these lessons as part of the acquisition planning process for the remedial action contract.

Agency: Department of the Interior
Status: Open

Comments: As of September 2020, BIA and EPA had selected a cleanup option for Tuba City Dump, but BIA had not initiated the acquisition planning process for the future cleanup contract. BIA stated it anticipated completing the cleanup design work, including the acquisition package, by September 2022. GAO will assess BIA's actions once they are complete.

Recommendation: The Secretary of the Interior should direct the Director of the Bureau of Land Management to take steps, including making changes to AFMSS, and in any new system that replaces AFMSS, to improve the ability of staff to identify wells that are a high priority for environmental inspection and to incorporate information on the inspection history of wells into the environmental inspection prioritization process.

Agency: Department of the Interior
Status: Open

Comments: BLM concurred with the recommendation and has initiated action to update its application for permit to drill (APD) permit processing system. This new system will be known as AFMSS II and, when fully implemented, may address GAO's recommendations. Currently, BLM's actions are insufficient to close this recommendation because they have not completed the updates to AFMISS. Specifically, BLM has not completed its update of AFMSS II to cover environmental inspections. We will continue to follow up with BLM as the agency continues to take action to improve its well tracking system. BLM said it intends to update AFMSS II to cover environmental issues and projects that the remaining AFMSS II related tasks ensuring the system's full deployment will be completed by March 2020. In October 2019, we requested an update on BLM's timeframes.

Recommendation: The Secretary of the Interior should direct the Director of the Bureau of Land Management to take steps to ensure that environmental violations or problems and enforcement actions are documented in a consistent manner.

Agency: Department of the Interior
Status: Open

Comments: In August 2018, BLM informed us that the agency has taken several corrective actions to address the implementation of the recommendation, which will be accomplished related to the redesign of its Automated Fluid Minerals Support System (AFMSS). However, the agency reported that this system will not be completed until March 2020. In October 2019, we requested an update on BLM's timeframes.