On Wednesday, January 10, 2024, at 10:15 a.m., in room 1324 Longworth
House Office Building, the Committee on Natural Resources, Subcommittee
on Oversight and Investigations and the Subcommittee on Federal Lands
will hold a joint oversight
hearing
titled “National Park Service’s Deferred Maintenance Backlog:
Perspectives from the Government Accountability Office and the Inspector
General.”
Hearing
memo
Witnesses:
- Cardell Johnson, Director, Natural Resources and Environment,
Government Accountability Office
- Mark Greenblatt, Inspector General, Department of the Interior
The National Park Service (NPS) manages 428 individual units across 85
million acres. There are many challenges facing
NPS, with none more pressing than the $22.3
billion deferred maintenance backlog. For decades, the Government
Accountability Office (GAO) has identified deferred maintenance as a
critical problem for federal land management agencies like
NPS, prompting the agency to add federal real
property to its “High Risk List” in 2003.3 Unlike routine maintenance,
deferred maintenance and repairs are “maintenance and repairs that were
not performed when they should have been or were scheduled to be and
which are put off or delayed for a future period.” A confluence of
factors contributed to the growing deferred maintenance backlog,
including aging infrastructure, adjustments in the methodology for
calculating deferred maintenance, inflation, supply chain issues,
consistently high visitation, and the acquisition of new land or
creation of new units for NPS to manage. The
failure to keep up with maintenance presents risks to
NPS resources, diminishes visitor enjoyment,
and creates safety hazards for the public. This means that parks are
often replete with crumbling trails, dilapidated visitor centers and
campgrounds, leaking wastewater systems, and closed off access points or
recreation sites. As the NPS maintenance
backlog continued to steadily rise through the 2010s, reaching $12.7
billion by the end of fiscal year (FY) 2019, a growing coalition of
NPS stakeholders began to push for Congress to
provide a solution.6 Administrations of both parties argued that
increased funding was vital to decrease NPS’s
deferred maintenance backlog, with NPS
testifying before Congress that “funding will help substantially reduce
the NPS $11.6 billion deferred maintenance
backlog.” In August 2020, Congress passed the Great American Outdoors
Act (GAOA). GAOA established a new, mandatory
fund known as the “National Parks and Public Land Legacy Restoration
Fund” (LRF) to address the deferred maintenance needs of
NPS and four other land management agencies.
The LRF is funded through 50 percent of the
unobligated or “miscellaneous” revenues deposited into the U.S. Treasury
from all forms of energy development (oil, gas, coal, and alternative or
renewable energy), up to $1.9 billion a year for five years ($9.5
billion total). 10 Of the amounts deposited in the
LRF each year, NPS
receives a 70 percent share ($1.33 billion). In addition to the
LRF, NPS receives billions of dollars in
funding to address deferred maintenance through regular appropriations
and retained recreation fees.
Since GAOA’s passage, the
LRF has not only failed to reduce
NPS’s deferred maintenance backlog, but the
backlog has increased by an astounding $9.6 billion. While all five
agencies that receive GAOA funding have seen
increases in deferred maintenance, no agency’s backlog has increased at
the scale of the NPS backlog. After receiving
two full years of GAOA funding totaling $2.66
billion, NPS’s backlog rose from $12.7 billion
at the end of FY 2019 to $22.3 billion at the
end of FY 2022.
In response to questions about how the backlog could increase at such an
alarming rate despite billions of dollars in taxpayer funding being
allocated to address this problem, NPS largely
attributed this increase to changes in its methodology for calculating
deferred maintenance. According to the agency, prior to
FY 2019, the agency only included construction
costs in its estimates of deferred maintenance.15 The agency decided to
change this methodology after a review initiated in September 2017
(known as “Project revAMP”) found “data inaccuracy and inconsistency and
laborious and costly processes.” Starting in FY
2019, cost estimates were expanded to “[align] with
contemporary industry standards” and include design, compliance, and
construction and project management.17 NPS
also transitioned away from calculating deferred maintenance by “using
the summation of work order costs,” which were inherently inconsistent
and unreliable, to a more comprehensive system. In its
FY 2024 budget justification,
NPS elaborated that this system will consist
of three components: (1) Parametric condition assessments (PCA) for
industry standard assets; (2) Federal Highways Administration
assessments for infrastructure, such as paved roads, parking lots,
bridges and tunnels; and (3) work orders for concessions-occupied assets
and non-industry standard assets. This methodology change was partially
implemented starting in FY 2022 and is
expected to be fully implemented by FY 2024
(September 30th of this year). It is important to note that these
methodology changes and subsequent NPS
explanations have created significant confusion about the true nature of
NPS’s backlog. For example, in 2022 the
GAO said that “Interior officials explained
that an $8.8 billion increase in deferred maintenance and repairs from
fiscal year 2020 through fiscal year 2021 was in part the result of the
addition of design, compliance, and construction management costs to
estimates at the National Park Service.” However, the backlog increased
by $7.43 billion between these years, leaving an unexplained $1.4
billion gap. Adding to this confusion, this is also the year that
NPS applied a blanket 35 percent markup to its
estimates, which alone increased the backlog by $3.7 billion. Further,
while a methodology change could explain a portion of the increase in
backlog, it does not explain the full extent of the backlog increase.
The largest increase in the NPS backlog, from
$14.37 billion in 2020, the year GAOA was
passed, to $21.8 billion in FY 2021, occurred
the year before the new methodology was put into place. Between
FY 2021 and FY 2022,
the year the agency implemented its methodology change, the backlog only
increased by $500 million.
In September 2023, DOI’s Office of Inspector
General (OIG) released a report entitled “The National Park Service
Faces Challenges in Managing Its Deferred Maintenance.” The
OIG found serious discrepancies with
NPS’s reporting and tracking of deferred
maintenance that “compromise the NPS’ ability
to achieve its mission, manage its deferred maintenance, and fulfill its
responsibility to ensure the safety of visitors and
NPS staff.” In particular, the report found
that NPS continues to rely on inaccurate and
incomplete data for its deferred maintenance, inappropriately inflated
its backlog by 35 percent without sufficient justification, and did not
consistently monitor and complete critical Health, Life, and Safety
(HLS) work orders. The OIG made eight
recommendations to NPS to address these
concerns, two of which remain open: (1) developing and implementing
policies to more appropriately estimate the cost of deferred maintenance
projects and (2) including more accurate estimates for all existing and
future work orders. One of the most concerning findings of the
OIG is that NPS, as
previously mentioned, applied a blanket 35 percent markup to all
deferred maintenance projects in 2021, increasing the total backlog by
$3.7 billion, without sufficient methodology to support this markup.
This markup consisted of increases of 5 percent for compliance, 17
percent for design, 8 percent for construction management, and 5 percent
for project management. The OIG reported that
while this is consistent with methodology the Federal Highway
Administration uses for transportation projects,
NPS officials could not provide a rationale or
documentation for why it was appropriate to apply this methodology to
all deferred maintenance projects, including non-transportation
projects. The OIG found that the
DOI policy NPS did
cite as justification for this “standard” markup “has no reference to a
standard markup of 35 percent.” The OIG found
that this application may lead to further overestimations of
NPS’s backlog, as the 35 percent markup could
be duplicative with other markups applied by the agency. Further, the
OIG found that this application was
inappropriate because it assumed all deferred maintenance would be
completed by outside contractors, when a significant portion is
completed by NPS staff at a lower cost.
The OIG specifically found that
NPS inconsistently entered deferred
maintenance work orders in its tracking system (the Facility Management
Software System, or FMSS), leading to hundreds
of thousands of work orders that were outdated, inaccurate, and were not
being properly monitored. The OIG identified
214,000 work orders that were not correctly classified as deferred
maintenance, leading overall deferred maintenance estimates to be off by
$2.6 billion. The OIG also found that
NPS did not properly close out completed work
orders, and identified 3,667 open deferred maintenance work orders,
totaling $364 million, that had been completed but were still being
counted towards the backlog total.
House Natural Resources Committee
Federal Lands Subcommittee
Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee
1324 Longworth
01/10/2024 at 10:15AM
