Problems Affecting Usefulness of the National Water Assessment

Gao ID: CED-77-50 March 23, 1977

The Water Resources Council is conducting the 1975 National Water Assessment in cooperation with Federal, State and regional agencies. Scheduled for completion in December 1977, the project should cost $6.8 million. Problems have appeared raising doubts about the reliability and usefulness of the assessment. The agencies involved have been unable to resolve some discrepancies in the water data and some have questioned the assessment's usefulness.

The assessment is designed to identify future national and regional water needs and compare Federal and State-regional viewpoints on such problems. The large discrepancies discovered when federally prepared data were compared with regional data developed because the accumulation of water supply and use data involves many factors, such as data sources, methodology, assumptions, and judgments, which can cause significantly different results.

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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