Federal Reports

During the week of March 31, 2025, we performed a self-initiated audit at the Louisville Processing and Distribution Center (P&DC) and three delivery units serviced by the P&DC. The delivery units included the Iroquois Station, Middletown Branch, and Pleasure Ridge Park Branch in Louisville, KY.  

We issued individual reports for the three delivery units and the P&DC. We also issued another report summarizing the results of our audits at all three delivery units with specific recommendations for management to address.

Why We Did This Report

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Office of Inspector General conducted this audit to determine how the EPA has managed its Brownfields Program and allocated funds under the program since enactment of the Brownfields Utilization, Investment, and Local Development Act.

Summary of Findings

We identified two areas that may warrant management attention and further research:

• Data inaccuracies in the EPA’s Grants Research Information Portal database, which could limit EPA staff’s ability to accurately monitor and report on grant funds using the database.
• Increased grant funding due to Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act appropriations, which could pose challenges for EPA oversight of grant funds and associated results. The EPA will have to monitor a higher number of brownfields projects—including larger, more complex projects—for years after FY 2026 while not receiving additional Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act appropriations to fund regional oversight staff.

Our Objective(s)Assess FAA's identification and measurement of the impacts of external factors, such as weather and airline decision making, on Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) benefits and costs.
Why This AuditNextGen is a multibillion-dollar infrastructure effort that aims to modernize the National Airspace System (NAS) to provide safer and more efficient air traffic management. In 2021, we reported that NextGen's benefits had not kept pace with expectations due to implementation challenges and other factors, including external factors such as weather and airline decision making that are beyond FAA's control. Following the issuance of our report, Congress directed our office to report on the extent to which NextGen benefits and costs can change due to external factors.
What We FoundFAA identifies multiple external factors in its NextGen benefit and cost analyses.

FAA's Business Case Analysis Reports show it considered external factors in projecting individual NextGen programs' benefits and costs. For example, FAA considered the impact of external factors such as fuel prices, weather, and equipage rates in projecting the Data Communications program's benefits and costs.
FAA also identifies many external factors that impact NextGen's overall benefits and costs. For example, FAA's Business Case model incorporated external factors, such as the Terminal Area Forecast (TAF), which projects trends in future air traffic growth at major airports, as well as passenger value of time rates and weather to calculate and monetize reductions in delay minutes.

FAA has not systematically measured the impact of individual external factors on overall NextGen benefits and costs.

FAA conducts analyses to account for the possible impacts of external factors on the benefits and costs for individual NextGen programs. However, except for the TAF, FAA has not conducted a systematic analysis of how sensitive NextGen's overall benefits and costs are to changes in major external factors.
This impacts the overall reliability of FAA's projections of NextGen's benefits and costs. Since NextGen systems and their capabilities will continue to be deployed well beyond 2025, FAA's ability to prioritize programs and their scopes may not be as effective without the most accurate benefit and cost projections the Agency can produce.

RecommendationsWe made 1 recommendation to inform FAA's projections of overall benefits and costs for NextGen or other future NAS modernization efforts.

The Office of Inspector General (OIG) is issuing this report to present the results of our audit of SBA’s Oversight of Shuttered Venue Operators Grant (SVOG) Recipients. The SVOG program was established on December 27, 2020, as part of the Economic Aid to Hard-Hit Small Businesses, Nonprofits and Venues Act. In total, Congress provided $16.25 billion for the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) to award grants to eligible businesses in the live arts and entertainment industry.

As of October 2024, SBA identified $544 million in potential improper payments that need to be recovered. SBA established performance goals, measured progress, and reported that the SVOG program met all three performance goals. However, we found one of those goals, the number of SVOG recipients that continued or reopened operations, was not measured with representative data.  SBA should establish and implement timeframes for each closeout activity. Without prompt action to closeout these awards, SBA has no assurance that taxpayer funds were used for the intended purpose.  

We made six recommendations for SBA to improve recovery of SVOG funds where needed, expedite the award closeout process, better monitor the use of SVOG funds, and report on the limitations of data used for SVOG performance results.