Recovery Act: Funds Supported Many Water Projects, and Federal and State Monitoring Shows Few Compliance Problems

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act) provided $4 billion for the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Clean Water State Revolving Fund (SRF) and $2 billion for the agency's Drinking Water SRF. The Recovery Act requires GAO to review funds made available under the act and comment on recipients' reports of jobs created and retained. These jobs are reported as full-time equivalent (FTE) positions on a Web site created for the Recovery Act on www.Recovery.gov. GAO examined the (1) status and use of Recovery Act SRF program funds nationwide and in nine states; (2) EPA and state actions to monitor the act's SRF program funds; (3) EPA and selected states' approaches to ensure data quality, including for jobs reported by recipients of the act's funds; and (4) challenges, if any, that states have faced in implementing the act's requirements. For this work, GAO, among other things, obtained and analyzed EPA nationwide data on the status of Recovery Act clean and drinking water funds and projects and information from a nonprobability sample of nine states that represent all but 1 of EPA's 10 regions. GAO also interviewed EPA and state officials on their experiences with the Recovery Act SRF program funds.