Water Resources

The Corps of Engineers' Revised Review Process for Proposed Civil Works Projects Gao ID: RCED-90-188 September 13, 1990

GAO reported on: (1) changes to the Army Corps of Engineers' review process for feasibility studies used to recommend congressional authorization for constructing proposed civil works water resource projects; and (2) the Office of Management and Budget's (OMB) role in the review process.

GAO found that: (1) due to the short period of time since implementation of the new process, no projects had completed the process by the time GAO completed fieldwork, rendering it too early to judge the process' effectiveness; (2) newly implemented issue resolution conferences helped familiarize headquarters-level review elements with projects and provided for early identification and resolution of various issues; (3) detailed concurrent review at the headquarters level raised technical and policy concerns and resolved them before reviewers made final decisions on projects; (4) the first proposed project did not meet the new time goals for each step or the final 30-day goal for the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works to review the feasibility report and submit it to Congress following OMB review; (5) the new process should shorten review time within the Corps and help the proposed project move more rapidly; and (6) during a 3-year period, OMB accomplished its reviews of such projects within 30 days in only 4 of 25 analyzed cases.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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