What GAO Found

United States Government Accountability Office

Why GAO Did This Study

Highlights

Accountability Integrity Reliability

www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-06-96.

To view the full product, including the scope 

and methodology, click on the link above. 

For more information, contact Anu Mittal at 

(202) 512-3841 or mittala@gao.gov. 

Highlights of GAO-06-96, a report to 

congressional requesters 

October 2005

CHESAPEAKE BAY PROGRAM 

Improved Strategies Are Needed to Better 

Assess, Report, and Manage Restoration 

Progress 

The Bay Program has over 100 measures to assess progress toward meeting 

certain restoration commitments and providing information to guide 

management decisions. However, the program has not yet developed an 

integrated approach that would allow it to translate these individual 

measures into an assessment of overall progress toward achieving the five 

broad restoration goals outlined in Chesapeake 2000. For example, while the 

Bay Program has appropriate measures to track crab, oyster, and rockfish 

populations, it does not have an approach for integrating the results of these 

measures to assess progress toward the agreement’s goal of protecting and 

restoring the bay’s living resources. The Bay Program has recognized that it 

may need an integrated approach for assessing overall progress in restoring 

the bay and, in November 2004, a task force began working on this effort. 

The State of the Chesapeake Bay reports are the Bay Program’s primary 

mechanism for reporting the current health status of the bay. However, these 

reports do not effectively communicate the bay’s current conditions because 

they focus on the status of individual species or pollutants instead of 

providing information on a core set of ecosystem characteristics. Moreover, 

the credibility of these reports has been negatively impacted because the 

program has commingled various kinds of data such as monitoring data, 

results of program actions, and the results of its predictive model without 

clearly distinguishing among them. As a result, the public cannot easily 

determine whether the health of the bay is improving or not. Moreover, the 

lack of independence in the Bay Program’s reporting process has led to 

negative trends being downplayed and a rosier picture of the bay’s health 

being reported than may have been warranted. The program has recognized 

that improvements are needed and is developing new reporting formats. 

From fiscal years 1995 through 2004, the restoration effort received about 

$3.7 billion in direct funding from 11 key federal agencies; the states of 

Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia; and the District of Columbia. These 

funds were used for activities that supported water quality protection and 

restoration, sound land use, vital habitat protection and restoration, living 

resource protection and restoration, and stewardship and community 

engagement. During this time period, the restoration effort also received an 

additional $1.9 billion in indirect funding. 

 

The Bay Program does not have a comprehensive, coordinated 

implementation strategy to better enable it to achieve the goals outlined in 

Chesapeake 2000. Although the program has adopted 10 key commitments 

to focus partners’ efforts and developed plans to achieve them, some of 

these plans are inconsistent with each other or are perceived as 

unachievable by program partners. The limited assurances about the 

availability of resources beyond the short term further complicate the Bay 

Program’s ability to effectively coordinate restoration efforts and 

strategically manage its resources. 

The Chesapeake Bay Program (Bay 

Program) was created in 1983 

when Maryland, Pennsylvania, 

Virginia, the District of Columbia, 

the Chesapeake Bay Commission, 

and EPA agreed to establish a 

partnership to restore the 

Chesapeake Bay. Their most recent 

agreement, Chesapeake 2000, sets 

out an agenda and five broad goals 

to guide these efforts through 2010 

and contains 102 commitments that 

the partners agreed to accomplish. 

GAO was asked to examine (1) the 

extent to which appropriate 

measures for assessing restoration 

progress have been established, (2) 

the extent to which current 

reporting mechanisms clearly and 

accurately describe the bay’s 

overall health, (3) how much 

funding was provided for the effort 

for fiscal years 1995 through 2004, 

and (4) how effectively the effort is 

being coordinated and managed. 

What GAO Recommends

GAO recommends that the 

Administrator of EPA instruct the 

Chesapeake Bay Program Office to 

(1) complete its efforts to develop 

and implement an integrated 

assessment approach; (2) revise its 

reporting approach to improve the 

effectiveness and credibility of its 

reports; and (3) develop a 

comprehensive, coordinated 

implementation strategy that takes 

into account available resources. 

In commenting on this report, the 

signatories to the Chesapeake 2000

agreement generally agreed with 

GAO’s recommendations.