From the U.S. Government Accountability Office, www.gao.gov

Transcript for:  Comptroller General Testifies to U.S. Senate on GAO's
2021 High Risk List Update

Description: In his March 2, 2021, testimony to the U.S. Senate
Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Comptroller
General Gene Dodaro provides an update of GAO's 2021 High Risk List,
including two new areas added since 2020: Emergency Loans for Small
Businesses, and National Efforts to Prevent, Respond to, and Recover
from Drug Misuse.

Related GAO Work: GAO-21-384T, High-Risk Series: Dedicated Leadership
Needed to Address Limited Progress in Most High-Risk Areas


[Comptroller General Gene Dodaro:] Thank you very much Chairwoman
Maloney, Ranking Member Comer, members of the committee. I'm very
pleased to have this opportunity to talk about GAO's latest high-risk
update today. There have been some bright spots and improvement.
However, our overall conclusion is that there's been limited progress in
the majority of the high-risk areas. Twenty, as you mentioned,
Chairwoman Maloney, have remained the same with their ratings. Five have
regressed. Now, on the positive side, seven areas made improvements in
their ratings, one to the point -- as Ranking Member Comer mentioned --
of coming off the list. That's the Defense Support Infrastructure area.
They reduced their warehouse, office space, properties, reduced their
leasing costs, as we've recommended, taken action to get
intergovernmental agreements in place to reduce their cost of operating
their bases, and so we feel comfortable. Now, when we take something off
the list, that doesn't mean it's out of sight. So we keep an eye on the
area to make sure that it is, in fact, fixed. And now on the other side
of the equation, we're adding two new areas to the high-risk list. The
first is the federal government's efforts to prevent, respond to, and
recover from drug abuse. Unfortunately, from 2002 to 2019, 800,000
Americans have lost their lives to drug overdoses. The latest period
from May '19 to '20 -- May '20 has the highest recorded number of deaths
already on a preliminary basis of 80,000 people. This area needs greater
federal leadership, attention, coordination, and a complete national
strategy that's executed properly, monitored and refined going forward
to combat this and other public health crises that we're facing, in
addition to the pandemic. Secondly, we're adding SBA's emergency loan
programs. Now, these loan programs have been of tremendous help to small
businesses across the United States during the pandemic, and I want to
emphasize that this designation does not detract from the good that
these programs have done. However, we think when you're spending close
to a trillion dollars, you also need good accountability and
transparency, and by those standards, these programs have not met that
goal. There is need for greater oversight and management for program
integrity to minimize fraud and to provide better accountability to the
taxpayer. SBA was unable to get an opinion from its financial auditors
this past year because they couldn't substantiate loan balances and
other issues. Now, there are a number of existing high-risk areas I want
to call your attention to. First is the cybersecurity of our nation. I
first designated this a high-risk area across the entire federal
government in 1997. We added critical infrastructure protection in 2003.
The federal government is still not operating, in my opinion, at a pace
commensurate with the evolving serious threats that are presented in
this area, so we put forth a number of recommendations. Second is the
federal workforce. There are critical skill gaps. Twenty-two of the
high-risk areas are on there in part because of skill gaps in the
programs, and the federal government is, in my view, not well postured
as it needs to be to meet 21st century challenges. This committee is
very familiar with the high-risk issues in the US Postal Service and
Census, so I won't go into those much detail. Limiting the federal
government's fiscal exposure by managing climate risk is a very
important issue. The government's been sure of flood insurance, crop
insurance. It is the biggest property owner in the United States and
landowner. It needs to limit disaster aid -- it's now over a trillion
dollars or half a trillion dollars since Katrina took place -- by
building better resilience in up front. So the bottom line here is that
only 12 of the high-risk areas have had leadership met as part of the
criteria, so we need much greater leadership on the part of the
agencies, OMB, and continued oversight and engagement from the Congress.
GAO's ready to do its part to help. Thank you very much. I'd be happy to
answer questions.