Federal Reports

Our objectives were to identify CDC’s potential risks for preparing for and responding to hurricanes and other natural disasters and to determine whether CDC has designed and implemented controls and strategies to mitigate these potential risks.

This report is the second in a series about the Mechanical department’s operating efficiency and focuses on the department’s service and inspection activities. The company has a total of 62 locations nationwide where it services and inspects trainsets; 50 smaller outlying sites, as well as 12 larger preventative maintenance facilities. Our audit objective was to identify opportunities, if any, for the Mechanical department to reduce the cost of its service and inspection operations at its 50 outlying sites.We identified several opportunities for the company to reduce the costs of service and inspection activities, including adjusting workloads and staffing to achieve greater efficiencies and better managing overtime hours. For example, we found that some of the work being conducted at company and contractor staffed service and inspection sites could be performed by staff at service and inspection areas within preventative maintenance facilities while still meeting timelines mandated by federal safety standards. Additionally, in our review of 4 of the 16 company-staffed service and inspection sites, we found that full-time employees worked standard 8 hour shifts although these sites do not have enough service and inspection work to fill an 8-hour shift. Finally, we found that in fiscal year 2017, the company paid $3.1 million in overtime at the 16 service and inspection sites staffed with company employees, even though some managers were not aware that staff were incurring overtime or the amount incurred. Depending on the extent of changes implemented, the company could put $2.3 million to $6.4 million to better use annually.To address its findings, the OIG recommended that Amtrak consider the extent to which it can take actions to operate more efficiently at its service and inspection sites. This includes identifying opportunities to shift work from these sites to the service and inspection areas of preventative maintenance facilities, reducing unnecessary full-time positions at sites without a full-time workload, and better managing the amount of overtime that staff incur at service and inspection sites.

What We Looked AtAccelerating project delivery has been a longstanding priority for the Department of Transportation (DOT) and is a key part of the most recent reauthorization for surface transportation programs--the Fixing America's Surface Transportation (FAST) Act. The FAST Act includes a number of provisions intended to streamline the environmental review process for transportation projects. In particular, section 1313 of the act requires DOT to undertake several actions to align Federal environmental reviews such as developing a coordinated and concurrent environmental review and permitting process and a checklist to facilitate interagency collaboration. The FAST Act also directs the Office of Inspector General to report on DOT's progress in implementing section 1313 and its associated impact. Accordingly, we initiated an audit to (1) determine DOT's progress in aligning Federal environmental reviews and (2) assess the impact of DOT's actions on accelerating the environmental review and permitting process.What We FoundDOT has completed all the actions required by section 1313 and has met or exceeded the associated deadlines. However, the impact of those actions is limited because the legislation applies to only a small subset of transportation projects. Specifically, section 1313 generally applies only to transportation projects when there is a major action that significantly affects the quality of the human environment, which requires agencies to initiate an environmental impact statement under the National Environmental Policy Act. Additionally, a statutory provision excludes highway, railroad, transit, and multimodal projects, which are subject to other requirements for streamlining environmental reviews. As a result, section 1313 only covers certain aviation and maritime projects. We identified two current aviation projects and no maritime projects that are subject to this section, and the actions mandated by section 1313 do not impose any additional requirements on the covered projects. Nonetheless, the Department has several other initiatives--based on the FAST Act, prior legislation, and executive action--to streamline environmental reviews for transportation projects.Our RecommendationsWe did not make any recommendations in this report as the data gathered are informational and meant to be responsive to the statutory mandate.

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This report presents the results of our unannounced inspection August 16, 2018, of passenger ferry safety aboard ferry service to Bulls Island in the Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge, Awendaw, SC. The objective of our inspection was to determine whether Coastal Expeditions, Inc., a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) concessionaire, operated its ferry service to Bulls Island in compliance with Federal safety requirements.Specifically, each of its two vessels had a U.S. Coast Guard Certificate of Inspection on board, carried enough life vests for all passengers, had fire extinguishers available that had been inspected regularly, and carried first aid kits. In addition, crew members possessed current operating licenses and CPR certifications, and passed random drug tests. While we inspected both ferries, the concessionaire’s largest ferry was the only one in use during the period of our inspection and we found that it did not carry more passengers than allowed.