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<classification authority="sudocs">GA 1.13:RCED-00-54</classification>
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 <subject>Water pollution control</subject>
 <subject>Environmental monitoring</subject>
 <subject>Water quality</subject>
 <subject>State-administered programs</subject>
 <subject>Interagency relations</subject>
 <subject>Data collection</subject>
 <subject>Reporting requirements</subject>
 <subject>Federal/state relations</subject>
 <identifier>EPA National Water Quality Inventory</identifier>
 <identifier>USGS National Water Quality Assessment Program</identifier>
 <identifier>EPA National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System</identifier>
 <identifier>EPA Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program</identifier>
 <identifier>EPA Index of Watershed Indicators</identifier>
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<titleInfo>
 <title>Water Quality: Key EPA and State Decisions Limited by</title>
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<abstract>Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the
Environmental Protection Agency&apos;s (EPA) National Water Quality
Inventory, focusing on whether: (1) the information in EPA&apos;s National
Water Quality Inventory is reliable and representative of water quality
conditions nationwide; and (2) available data are sufficient to allow
state officials to make key decisions about activities required by the
Clean Water Act, such as identifying waters that do not meet water
quality standards and developing strategies to address those waters.&lt;p/&gt;GAO noted that: (1) the National Water Quality Inventory does not
accurately portray water quality conditions nationwide; (2) a major
reason is that it would be cost-prohibitive to physically monitor all of
the waters in the country, and, therefore, almost all states monitor a
subset of their waters; (3) most monitoring is not done in a way that
allows for statistically valid assessments of water quality conditions
in unmonitored waters; (4) the Inventory is not reliable because wide
variation exists in: (a) the way that individual states select their
monitoring sites; (b) the kinds of tests they perform on their waters
and how the results of these tests are interpreted; and (c) the methods
they use to determine the causes and sources of pollution in waters that
do not meet water quality standards; (5) as a result, the information in
the Inventory cannot be meaningfully compared across states; (6) EPA
used information from the Inventory as a basis for a number of important
decisions and activities, such as deciding how to allocate federal funds
for Clean Water Act programs to states and measuring and communicating
EPA&apos;s and states&apos; progress in implementing the act; (7) the dearth of
the waters actually monitored, combined with the wide variation among
states&apos; monitoring and assessment approaches, make the national
statistics unreliable and subject to misinterpretation and, therefore of
limited usefulness for these purposes; (8) there is little doubt among
experts that the remaining problems are considerable and that solutions
will entail significant expenditures; (9) what is uncertain is the
precise extent of water quality problems, where and what the most severe
problems are, and the location of high-quality waters that need to be
protected; (10) the limitations of the information in the Inventory
extend well beyond the problems associated with the national uses of the
report; (11) state-level activities, such as identifying water quality
problems and setting priorities among them to obtain the most
improvement in water quality for the dollar spent, are also affected by
data limitations; (12) GAO&apos;s survey shows that data gaps limit states&apos;
abilities to carry out several key management and regulatory activities
on water quality; (13) only six states reported that they have a
majority of the data they need to assess whether their waters meet water
quality standards; and (14) a vast majority of states reported that they
have less than half the data they need to: (a) identify nonpoint sources
that are causing waters not to meet standards; and (b) develop total
maximum daily loads (TMDL) for those waters.</abstract>
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<note>Chapter Report</note>
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<subject>
 <topic>Water pollution control</topic>
 <topic>Environmental monitoring</topic>
 <topic>Water quality</topic>
 <topic>State-administered programs</topic>
 <topic>Interagency relations</topic>
 <topic>Data collection</topic>
 <topic>Reporting requirements</topic>
 <topic>Federal/state relations</topic>
 <topic>EPA National Water Quality Inventory</topic>
 <topic>USGS National Water Quality Assessment Program</topic>
 <topic>EPA National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System</topic>
 <topic>EPA Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program</topic>
 <topic>EPA Index of Watershed Indicators</topic>
 <topic>USGS National Stream Quality Accounting Network</topic>
 <topic>NOS National Status and Trends Program</topic>
</subject>
<relatedItem type="isReferencedBy">
 <titleInfo>
  <title>United States Code</title>
  <partNumber>Title 33 Section 1251-1387</partNumber>
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 <identifier type="USC citation">33 U.S.C. 1251-1387</identifier>
</relatedItem>
<relatedItem type="isReferencedBy">
 <titleInfo>
  <title>United States Statutes at Large</title>
  <partNumber>Volume 109 Page 707</partNumber>
</titleInfo>
 <identifier type="Statute citation">109 Stat. 707</identifier>
</relatedItem>
<relatedItem type="isReferencedBy">
 <titleInfo>
  <title>United States Public Law 66 (104th Congress)</title>
</titleInfo>
 <identifier type="public law citation">Public Law 104-66</identifier>
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