Environmental Protection: EPA's and States' Efforts to Focus State EnforcementPrograms on Results

摘要

Most major environmental statutes allow the Environmental Proctection Agency(EPA) to delegate the responsibility for key programs to qualified states. Some states have supplemented these traditional enforcement activities with other, more cooperative approaches to improve compliance through technical assistance and various incentives. To understand more about the potential for these alternative strategies to make compliance more efficient and effective, the Chairman and Ranking Member of the House Committee on Commerce asked GAO to determine (1) what alternative compliance strategies states are practicing, (2) whether and how states are measuring the effectiveness of these strategies, and (3) how EPA has responded to these states' efforts, focusing, in particular on the agency's objective of holding the states accountable for achieving environmental results, rather than focusing solely on enforcement processes.