Skip to main content
  • Click to open or close the program search boxShow Me Programs
    • Show me the programs that are
      performing Go
    • Show me the programs that are
      not performing Go
ExpectMore.govExpectMore.gov home pageEXPECT FEDERAL PROGRAMS TO PERFORM WELL, AND BETTER EVERY YEAR.
Program Assessment

Program

View Assessment Details

Drinking Water Protection Program

The purpose of the program is to work with federal, state and local government partners to protect public health by ensuring the safety of drinking water from public supplies.

Rating

What This Rating Means

PERFORMING
Adequate

This rating describes a program that needs to set more ambitious goals, achieve better results, improve accountability or strengthen its management practices.
  • The program is unable to measure its impact on public health, in part because states provide only aggregate data. Though the program measures compliance with drinking water standards designed to protect public health, it does not measure the actual public health impacts of water quality improvement or decline.
  • The program balances national benefits with national costs when developing regulations, though negative distributional effects in small systems may be masked by the national focus. To help address this potential deficiency, the program has proposed revisions to its methodology for determining the affordability of drinking water rules for small systems.
  • The program has made progress in improving data reliability of the Safe Drinking Water Information System, which contains violation information for regulated public drinking water systems.

Improvement Plan

About Improvement Plans

We are taking the following actions to improve the performance of the program:

  • Developing a long-term outcome performance measure to assess the public health impacts of improvements in drinking water compliance.
  • Revising the current drinking water small system affordability methodology to address negative distributional impacts.
  • Implementing data quality review recommendations to improve the overall quality of the data in EPA's drinking water compliance reporting system.

Learn More

The content on ExpectMore.gov is developed by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget and Federal agencies.