EPA serious about improving grants management, official says

For the first time, the Environmental Protection Agency has a concrete agenda for improving a long-standing problem-inadequate grants management, an agency official told lawmakers Wednesday.

The five-part Long-Term Grants Management Plan released in April outlines the steps EPA will take to better train employees overseeing grants, foster more competition during the grants application process, document accomplishments made possible through grant money and enhance technology available to grants administrators, said Morris Winn, the agency's assistant administrator for resources management.

EPA officials have already started to implement the plan, Winn said, but the process will take a while. Once in place, the new procedures and technology will eliminate grants management problems that the EPA's inspectors general, the General Accounting Office and various lawmakers have pointed out for years, he added, turning the EPA into a model for other agencies distributing grants.

The EPA has had trouble soliciting an adequate number of organizations to compete for grants, conducting thorough reviews of grant applicants, overseeing grants once they are disbursed, and linking results achieved through grant funds to overall performance goals, Nikki Tinsley, the agency's inspector general, and John Stephenson, director of natural resources at GAO, told lawmakers at a Wednesday hearing before the House Water Resources and Environment Subcommittee.

"These findings undermine the public's confidence in the integrity of EPA's grant management programs and underscore the need for sustained and decisive action," Winn said.

The EPA awards roughly $4 billion in grants each year, amounting to about half its budget. A majority of these grants go to states and local governments, but roughly 6 percent go to nonprofit groups.

This 6 percent is the portion Congress and government overseers are most worried about. The EPA inspector general has uncovered multiple instances where nonprofit grant recipients have awarded work to contractors without using the competitive selection process required by the government, Tinsley testified. In one case, a nonprofit gave two contracts to its for-profit subsidiary without a competition. Of the 23 contractors the grant recipient employed, 20 of them had not competed for the work.

The new management plan will only be effective at solving EPA's problems if managers take it seriously, Tinsley cautioned. "The deficiencies in EPA's pre-award reviews and post-award oversight were not due to the lack of policies, but rather existing policies and guidance were not always followed," she said.

Under the plan, the EPA will offer new training programs to grant administrators, helping them hone their skills in such areas as managing competitions to select grant recipients and measuring the results that grantees achieve.

To ensure that an adequate number of organizations apply for grants, the five-step plan asks administrators to increase awareness of available awards by publishing announcements in the "Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance" and on www.FedGrants.gov, a Web site devoted to government grant opportunities. The grants management plan also creates a grants competition advocate position within the EPA's Office of Administration and Resources Management.

In addition, the plan calls on EPA to fully implement and improve technology for grants management. For example, the agency will make sure its Integrated Grants Management System, currently being deployed, stays on track, Winn said. The system helps managers track grant recipients to make sure they are meeting deadlines and achieving desired results.