Federal Reports

We reviewed the process the DOI’s Executive Resources Board (ERB) used to reassign senior executives to determine whether the ERB complied with Federal legal requirements and U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) guidance. Although the Deputy Solicitor expressed his belief that the process met all legal requirements, absent documentation, we could not independently determine whether or not the ERB complied with the Federal legal requirements governing the administration of the Senior Executive Service (SES). In addition, we found that the ERB did not follow OPM’s guidance for organizing and operating an ERB.The ERB—which was established to oversee the management of SES resources, to include position establishment, performance appraisals, executive development, and reassignments—reassigned 27 of its approximately 227 members of the SES between June 15, 2017, and October 29, 2017. We found that the ERB did not document its plan for selecting senior executives for reassignment, nor did it consistently apply the reasons it stated it used to select senior executives for reassignment. We also found that the ERB did not gather the information needed to make informed decisions about the reassignments, nor did it effectively communicate with the SES members or with most managers affected by the reassignments.As a result, many of the affected senior executives questioned whether these reassignments were political or punitive, based on a prior conflict with DOI leadership, or on the senior executive’s nearness to retirement. Many executives speculated that multiple reasons applied or believed their reassignment may have been related to their prior work assignments, including climate change, energy, or conservation.We made four recommendations that, if implemented, will improve the process for future reassignments. The Deputy Secretary concurred with all four recommendations. We considered one recommendation resolved and implemented, and three recommendations resolved but not implemented. We requested that the Deputy Secretary provide specific information to the Assistant Secretary for Policy, Management and Budget to track resolution and implementation.

The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) was authorized to receive $48 billion in funding for the 5-year period beginning October 1, 2008, to assist foreign countries in combating HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. Additional funds were authorized to be appropriated through 2018.

Pursuant to the Federal Information Security Modernization Act of 2014, we reviewed the Department’s security program, including its policies, procedures, and system security controls for the enterprise-wide intelligence system. Since our FY 2016 evaluation, the Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) has continued to provide effective oversight of the department-wide intelligence system and has implemented programs to monitor ongoing security practices. In addition, the United States Coast Guard is in the process of migrating its intelligence users to a system that is jointly managed by the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial Agency.

The objective of this limited scope follow up review was to determine if the agreed upon corrective actions taken in response to the safety and security findings from the 2012 OIG Program Evaluation of Peace Corps/Uganda were fully implemented and had the intended effects. This review included seven recommendations, all with which the post concurred.

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The Postal Service has a long history of piloting early forms of robots in sorting centers but has yet to really test the latest generation of robots for sorting and delivery. Although it will be many years before the technology is mature enough to be fully scalable, USPS would benefit from testing autonomous mobile robots for potentially assisting carriers, offering on demand delivery, and speeding up mail transport in sorting centers.

Delivery robots may seem futuristic, but this next wave of logistics technology is already being tested on neighborhood sidewalks from Washington, D.C. to the German spa town Bad Hersfeld and the Swiss capital Bern. To understand how the public might react to postal delivery robots, the OIG administered an online survey targeting a nationally representative sample of residents 18-75 years old in all 50 states and the District of Columbia in late November and early December 2017.