Federal Reports

The Railroad Retirement Board Complied with the Payment Integrity Information Act of 2019 for Fiscal Year 2023

Over the past several decades, the United States has lost ground as a leader in semiconductor chip manufacturing and research. Congress passed the CHIPS Act of 2022 to help rebuild the domestic semiconductor industry and strengthen semiconductor research and development.The CHIPS Act provides $50 billion to the Department of Commerce to support research and development, innovation, and manufacturing related to semiconductors. In addition, the CHIPS Act authorizes the Secretary of Commerce to issue up to $75 billion in direct loans and loan guarantees.The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is overseeing the Department’s CHIPS program. NIST established two offices to implement the CHIPS program: the CHIPS Program Office (CPO), responsible for implementing the semiconductor incentives program, and the CHIPS Research and Development Office (CRDO), responsible for programs undertaking research and development activities. The initial CHIPS leadership team was announced in September 2022 and undertook hiring for the two offices.The objective of our evaluation was to assess NIST’s progress in meeting workforce hiring milestones for CPO and CRDO. We found that NIST surpassed its hiring goals for CPO and CRDO but did not develop a comprehensive workforce plan to meet its human capital needs. Without a comprehensive workforce plan, CPO and CRDO lack assurance that they have adequately aligned their resources to fulfill their mission or identified current and future staffing opportunities and constraints. Workforce planning ensures that agencies have the right people with the right skills to accomplish the mission and enables agencies to meet current and future organizational goals and objectives.We made two recommendations to help NIST meet workforce needs for both the CHIPS program and future hiring efforts. NIST concurred with both recommendations.

What We Looked AtIn a typical year, the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) awards over $20 billion in grants for transit system development and improvement, including the purchase of real property for bus facilities, bus rapid transit, light rail, heavy rail, and commuter rail projects. Through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, Congress authorized as much as $108.1 billion to FTA to improve public transportation systems throughout the country. Given FTA’s large investment in these transit projects, we initiated this audit. Our audit objectives were to assess FTA’s oversight of grant recipients’ (1) reporting and (2) disposal of real property funded with FTA grant assistance.What We FoundFTA cannot identify all reportable real property associated with its grants, and real property data depend primarily on recipients’ self-reporting. Additionally, FTA does not conduct real property oversight reviews of all grant recipients with reportable property. FTA also does not enforce its requirement for recipients to maintain real property inventories or verify that their inventories include all reportable Federal interest. Furthermore, FTA does not enforce a regulatory requirement for recipients to submit annual reports on real property. Lastly, FTA’s oversight of real property disposition is inadequate to ensure recipients comply with disposal requirements. One grantee disposed of 62 properties without informing FTA because the grantee was unaware of whether an FTA financial interest existed in any of the properties. FTA’s insufficient oversight of reportable real property creates a higher risk that property will be disposed of without consideration for FTA’s financial interest. Our RecommendationsWe have made eight recommendations to help FTA improve its oversight of real property reporting and improve accountability for both FTA and its grant recipients when disposing of real property no longer needed for its intended purpose. FTA concurred with all eight recommendations. We consider all recommendations resolved but open pending completion of planned actions. 

The National Security Agency (NSA) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released an unclassified version of its Semiannual Report to Congress (SAR) summarizing the OIG’s oversight work from October 2023 through March 2024. The SAR describes a number of oversight products completed during the reporting period. In his SAR submission message, Deputy Inspector General Kevin B. Gerrity highlighted NSA OIG’s congressionally-requested evaluation of the relationship between NSA and U.S. Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM). NSA OIG found that adequate controls or processes were not always in place to ensure resources were appropriately delineated between NSA and USCYBERCOM. Gerrity states, “Our report will help NSA improve it’s processes in the future.”On May 17, 2024 the SAR was transmitted to Congress as required by the Inspector General Act of 1978, as amended.

Objective: The objective was to observe customer wait times in select Social Security Administration field offices and Social Security Card Centers. In addition, we determined the (1) factors that may affect customer wait times and (2) steps SSA took to reduce wait times.