Why We Did This Report
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Office of Inspector General initiated an evaluation of the EPA’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, or IIJA, allotments for lead service line replacements. While conducting work on that evaluation, which remains ongoing, we decided to issue this memorandum to alert the Agency of the risk of using unreliable data to allot IIJA funds for lead service line replacements.
Summary of Findings
As we evaluated the execution of the EPA’s 7th Drinking Water Infrastructure Needs Survey and Assessment, or DWINSA, we saw indications that a lack of internal controls may have caused the EPA to base its fiscal year 2023 allotment of $3 billion in IIJA funds for lead service line replacements on inaccurate data. As such, there is a risk that the EPA did not allot the fiscal year 2023 IIJA funds, and will not allot future IIJA funds, according to states’ lead-service-line-replacement needs.