United States Government Publishing Office publisher pbl distributor dst United States Government Accountability Office Resources, Community, and Economic Development Division author aut Government Organization text government publication eng GAOREPORTS Legislative Agency Publications gao legislative 2010-08-12 U.S. Government Printing Office 2000-03-15 monographic deposited born digital 78 p. GA 1.13:RCED-00-54 https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/GAOREPORTS-RCED-00-54 P0b002ee1803852c7 f:rc00054 DGPO 2010-08-12 2011-03-24 GAOREPORTS-RCED-00-54 machine generated eng fdlp REPORT GAOREPORTS-RCED-00-54 RCED-00-54 Water pollution control Environmental monitoring Water quality State-administered programs Interagency relations Data collection Reporting requirements Federal/state relations EPA National Water Quality Inventory USGS National Water Quality Assessment Program EPA National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System EPA Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program EPA Index of Watershed Indicators USGS National Stream Quality Accounting Network NOS National Status and Trends Program Chapter Report RCED

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) National Water Quality Inventory, focusing on whether: (1) the information in EPA'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.<p/>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's and states' progress in implementing the act; (7) the dearth of the waters actually monitored, combined with the wide variation among states' 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's survey shows that data gaps limit states' 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. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GAOREPORTS-RCED-00-54/html/GAOREPORTS-RCED-00-54.htm https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GAOREPORTS-RCED-00-54/pdf/GAOREPORTS-RCED-00-54.pdf GAO/RCED-00-54 https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/GAOREPORTS-RCED-00-54 Chapter Report GAO/RCED-00-54; Water Quality: Key EPA and State Decisions Limited by; Water pollution control Environmental monitoring Water quality State-administered programs Interagency relations Data collection Reporting requirements Federal/state relations EPA National Water Quality Inventory USGS National Water Quality Assessment Program EPA National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System EPA Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program EPA Index of Watershed Indicators USGS National Stream Quality Accounting Network NOS National Status and Trends Program Title 33 Section 1251-1387 33 U.S.C. 1251-1387 Volume 109 Page 707 109 Stat. 707 Public Law 104-66