Federal Reports

Our objective was to assess the Postal Service’s processing and delivery of Veterans Affairs Consolidated Mail Outpatient Pharmacy medications. We interviewed Postal Service management, obtained and analyzed Postal Service data, and visited Veterans Affairs Consolidated Mail Outpatient Pharmacy and third-party shipper locations to observe operations. Additionally, we judgmentally selected and visited 14 Postal Service facilities where we interviewed local management and employees and observed processing and delivery practices for medication packages.

From 2001 to 2022, the Community Development Block Grant - Disaster Recovery program provided almost $98 billion to states, cities, counties, and territories to help them recover from disasters. Administering disaster recovery has been a recurring U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) top management challenge since 2018. Therefore, we audited the disaster recovery program to determine whether the Office of Community Planning and Development (CPD) had improved the timing of its delivery of disaster recovery funds and whether it met congressional allocation timing requirements.CPD’s time to deliver disaster program funds to grant recipients varied between 2001 and 2022 and trended upward. For 2018 and 2019 disaster relief funding, CPD took significantly longer to allocate and award the funds. Further, CPD did not meet the publishing requirements mandated in one public law and did not meet the allocation requirements for another. CPD’s increase in time to deliver disaster program funds and its inability to meet a few of the statutory requirements were caused by (1) the disaster recovery program’s lacking permanent authorizing legislation; (2) required coordination among multiple Federal agencies, various HUD offices, and the grantees; and (3) other external and internal issues. As a result, grantees had to wait longer to execute their grant agreements and start spending the disaster recovery funds. Further, CPD lacked consistent and documented allocation data for all grantees, which impaired its ability to benchmark and consistently report the date of allocation to Congress or the public. In 2020, CPD issued a Federal Register (FR) notice with an appendix titled “The Consolidated Notice,” which decreased the time it took CPD to allocate disaster program funds. However, opportunities exist to further improve the timing of CPD’s delivery of disaster program funds. We recommend that the Director of the Office Disaster Recovery (1) collect and record the number of days that it or other entities take to complete each milestone in the grant process, (2) establish timing benchmarks for the milestones at each significant step in the allocation and award process based on actual data accumulated for the various grants, and (3) take steps to ensure that the milestone point of allocation is formally defined and documented, to allow for accurate tracking of compliance with requirements. We believe that implementation of the recommendations in this report will improve overall timing of program delivery and ensure that funds are provided to grantees as quickly as possible.

In November 2021, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA)1 provided $66 billion for passenger and freight rail improvements, the largest investment in rail in generations. Amtrak’s (the company) agreement workforce2—particularly its Electric Traction, Communication and Signals, and Track workers—will play a leading role in carrying out the company’s infrastructure rehabilitation and revitalization plans made possible in large part by IIJA. The company reported that it filled more than 4,600 agreement positions in fiscal year (FY) 2023 and expects to fill about 3,300 more by the end of FY 2024. Company officials acknowledge, however, that filling these jobs has been and continues to be challenging in a tight labor market in which multiple industries are vying for workers with the same skills and experience as the company—in many cases to support projects funded by IIJA in other transportation sectors.Our objective was to assess the extent to which the company is prepared to hire, onboard, and retain a sufficient agreement workforce to execute its growth plans. During our early work, managers in operating divisions voiced concerns that delays in the hiring process may be causing the company to lose viable candidates for its agreement ranks and could prevent it from efficiently bringing in new talent. We also noted potential issues with the company’s ability to track candidates through the preboarding process. Therefore, we revised our audit scope and methodology to identify any challenges in the Human Resources department that were contributing to these delays and tracking issues.

The EPA must execute processes with controls to enforce its stewardship of laptops and to safeguard against activities that could prevent it from protecting its assets from loss, theft, and mismanagement.