Careers
Natural Resources and Environment
Our Work
Recent Accomplishments
Ongoing Projects
Key Contacts
Our Work
The United States has vast natural resources and beauty and, at the same time, is home to a modern economy and high standard of living. These assets underlie a way of life that is the envy of much of the world. However, they also pose a challenge to the American people and their elected officials—namely, how to balance the need to protect these resources for future generations with the need to use them to maintain current economic prosperity. Every year, Congress faces this difficult question as it considers various bills related to natural resources and environmental issues that affect the lives of the American people on a daily basis.
The Natural Resources and Environment team contributes to these deliberations by providing fact-based analyses on a wide range of issues. In doing this work, our headquarters and field analysts concentrate mainly on the programs of the following agencies:
- Department of Agriculture.
- Department of Energy.
- Department of the Interior.
- Environmental Protection Agency.
- Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
- Army Corps of Engineers.
- National Science Foundation.
- National Marine Fisheries Service.
- Patent and Trademark Office.
Recent Accomplishments
- Helping to frame the challenging and complex choices associated with managing our nation’s natural resources.
- Identifying emerging and challenging issues regarding securing the nation’s critical infrastructure.
- Prompting improvements to the management of key environmental resources, such as fisheries.
- Demonstrating the need to secure our nation’s food supply, chemical plants, nuclear power plants, and nuclear weapons labs.
- Prompting the Department of Defense to better manage its efforts to clean up over 9,000 former defense sites, many of which are contaminated with hazardous and toxic wastes and unexploded ordnance.
- Prompting the Department of Agriculture to reduce its federal crop insurance program’s vulnerability to fraud, waste, and abuse.
- Ensuring that the Department of the Interior and the U.S. Forest Service, in consultation with the Wildland Fire Leadership Council, have implemented a plan to better measure the environmental effects of wildland fires.
- Ensuring that the Department of Energy undertook important steps to improve the effectiveness of its nuclear nonproliferation activities, such as focusing on higher risk threats to our national security.
- Prompting the Environmental Protection Agency to work with states to locate underground storage tanks that pose the greatest potential risk of leaking.
Ongoing Projects
- Studying the use and expansion of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
- Analyzing the uncertainty of future oil supplies.
- Examining the restoration of the Chesapeake Bay, Great Lakes Basin, and the Florida Everglades.
- Determining the amount of lead in drinking water.
- Determining the overlap of federal food safety programs.
- Examining the safety and reliability of our nuclear weapons stockpile.
- Analyzing the factors that affect the availability of ethanol as an alternative to gasoline.
- Scrutinizing the Fish and Wildlife Service’s oversight of endangered species programs.
- Examining U.S. efforts to combat nuclear smuggling here and abroad.
- Determining the effectiveness of the Environmental Protection Agency’s program to protect the public from toxic air pollution.
- Determining the effects of climate change on federal lands, implications on federal insurance, and the economic impacts of potential climate change policies.
- Analyzing the condition and management of U.S. fisheries.
Key Contacts
Managing Director: Patricia Dalton
Directors: Gene Aloise, Mark Gaffigan, David Maurer (acting), Anu Mittal, Robin M. Nazzaro, Frank Rusco (acting), Lisa Shames, John B. Stephenson.
Phone: (202) 512-3841
Mailing Address:
U.S. Government Accountability Office
Natural Resources and Environment
Room 2T23
441 G Street, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20548