Reality Check

This week EPA won the highest possible award for excellence in management. Every EPA employee should be proud of that. However, lest anyone get too comfortable, let me return to one of the areas that is still a challenge for this Agency.

Back in September I pointed out that we seem to be chronically late in crafting some of our most important rules. At that time we were, on average, 69 days late per important rule. Here we are three months later and we’ve gone in the wrong direction. We are now, on average, 76 days late (see graph).

When we started tracking this metric, I hoped that just by measuring timeliness, we would improve. That didn’t happen. I then decided to identify those rules that were the most late and put special emphasis on getting them done. (We called them ‘Gummy Bears’ since they seemed to raise especially sticky issues.) I hoped the additional attention on these several rules would accelerate their schedules. That didn’t happen. Finally, I decided to personally invest some time in addressing a few of the Gummy Bears that were the most late. I spent time getting up to speed on the substance and meeting with folks to see if we could achieve a break through. The result of that effort: nada.

What next? I’m contemplating that. Potential options are to increase the volume (put even more attention on these few rules) or bring out even bigger guns (get, for instance, the Administrator more involved). Whatever we do, we can’t just bask in the glow and comfort of what we’ve done. Accountability means enjoying our successes and facing up to where we aren’t doing as well as we hoped. This is one area where we need to do better.

Comments

[Matt Lakin]

While this seems like a disappointing trend, it's hard to know the significance of the results without a more established baseline. Not working in rulemaking, I would guess that rather dramatic fluctuations may be routine, and there certainly could be seasonal or intra-year trends (bursts of activity in May, September and January?). In my mind, both the absolute value and the trend are important for program evaluation. In order to better understand the trend, I was wondering:

Have you done any sort of sensitivity analysis on the data? I hope that you could tease out information on whether the trend is being driven by an across-the-board lateness, or by a subset of worst offenders (either having a greater number of worst offenders, or the same number, but getting later). A simple analysis would be to throw out a percentage of the worst offenders (try 1%, then 2%, etc.) and see if the trend levels off. This may provide you with an idea of where to expend more effort either pushing things along on a case-by-case basis (when worst offenders are the culprit) or creating structural change (when it's more of a general problem that’s getting worse).

Thanks for sharing!

[Marcus]

Great questions Matt! We don't have enough of a timeline yet to determine seasonal trends, but that should become clearer as we get into 2008. We'll go back and also see if a very few rules are driving the overall trend. I have a feeling that might be the case. All the more reason to focus our efforts on completing those few rules that seem to be the most late and, most importantly, figuring out how to avoid getting so far off our schedules in the future.

I've been looking for some common characteristics in these rules that are really late. If we can identify such rules from the start then we could either make our initial schedules more realistic or figure out a way to circumvent what is making them late. Unfortunately, I haven't yet found any common traits that could help us spot these early.

[Brian O'Connell]

Here it is 2008 and the radiation rule for Yucca Mountain is still not published in final form, though issued in draft in 2005. It would appear to be an Ultra Gummy Bear.

The folks at DOE who are trying their best, despite politically-driven budget cuts, to submit a license application to build the nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain hope to meet their milestone of June 2008 submission to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The NRC is supposed to apply the radiation rule (40 CFR Part 197) to be issued by EPA.

[Milwaukee Search Optimization]

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