The Great Lakes Basin covers approximately 300,000 square miles, encompassing Michigan and parts of Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and the Canadian province of Ontario (see fig. 1), as well as lands that are home to more than 40 Native American tribes. It includes the five Great Lakes and a large land area that extends beyond the Great Lakes, including their watersheds, tributaries, and connecting channels. Numerous environmental stressors threaten the health of the Great Lakes and adjacent land within the Great Lakes Basin. Decades of industrial activity in the region have left a legacy of contamination, such as from polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB), in the sediments that make up the beds of rivers and harbors in the Great Lakes Basin. In 1987, the United States and Canada identified a list of 43 severely degraded locations in the Great Lakes Basin as Areas of Concern—26 of which are located entirely in the United States; 5, shared by the United States and Canada; and 12, located entirely in Canada. As of May 2015, 4 of the Areas of Concern located entirely in the United States had been delisted, or removed, from the binational list. In addition, the fertile soil in the surrounding states makes them highly productive agricultural areas, resulting in large amounts of nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen—as well as sediment, pesticides, and other chemicals—running off into the Great Lakes. Moreover, large population centers on both sides of the U.S. and Canadian border use the Great Lakes to discharge wastewater from treatment plants, which also introduces nutrients into the Great Lakes. Even with progress in reducing the amount of phosphorus in the lakes in the 1970s, harmful algal blooms are once again threatening the Great Lakes Basin. The United States has long recognized the threats facing the Great Lakes and has developed agreements and programs to support restoration actions. For example, in 1972, the United States and Canada signed the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement to restore, protect, and enhance the water quality of the Great Lakes to promote the ecological health of the Great Lakes Basin. In addition, in 2002, the Great Lakes Legacy Act authorized EPA to carry out sediment remediation projects in the 31 Areas of Concern located entirely or partially in the United States, among other things. In 2004, the Task Force agencies collaborated with governors, mayors, tribes, and nongovernmental organizations in the Great Lakes region in an effort referred to as the Great Lakes Regional Collaboration, which led to the development in 2005 of the Great Lakes Regional Collaboration Strategy to Restore and Protect the Great Lakes. More than 1,500 individuals participated in this effort. In 2009, the President created the Asian Carp Regional Coordinating Committee to coordinate efforts to prevent Asian carp from spreading and becoming established. Even with these actions, the Great Lakes are environmentally vulnerable. In 2009, the President proposed $475 million in his fiscal year 2010 budget request for a new interagency initiative to accelerate the restoration of the Great Lakes. Specifically, the President requested that EPA and its federal partners coordinate state, tribal, local, and industry actions to protect, maintain, and restore the integrity of the Great Lakes. Most recently, in 2015, multiple bills to authorize the GLRI were introduced in the House and Senate. Some of these bills, if enacted, would authorize $300 million to be appropriated annually to carry out the GLRI for fiscal years 2016 through 2020. When Congress made funds available for the GLRI in fiscal year 2010, the conference report accompanying the appropriations act directed EPA to develop a comprehensive, multiyear restoration action plan for fiscal years 2011 through 2014, to establish a process to ensure monitoring and reporting on the progress of the GLRI, and to provide detailed, yearly program accomplishments beginning in 2011. As discussed in our July 2015 report, in fiscal years 2010 through 2014, $1.68 billion of federal funds was made available for the GLRI, and as of January 2015, EPA had allocated nearly all of the funds, about $1.66 billion. Also, as of January 2015, Task Force agencies had expended $1.15 billion for 2,123 projects (see fig. 2). GLRI funds are available for obligation for the fiscal year the appropriation was made and the successive fiscal year. After these 2 fiscal years of availability, GLRI funds can be used for 7 additional years to expend and adjust those obligations. Task Force agencies conduct GLRI work themselves or by awarding funds to recipients through financial agreements, such as grants, cooperative agreements, or contracts. Potential recipients of GLRI funds include federal entities; state, local, or tribal entities; nongovernmental organizations; academic institutions; and others, such as for-profit entities, agricultural producers, or private landowners. A single GLRI project can involve multiple funding recipients. Table 1 shows the number of projects funded with GLRI funds made available in fiscal years 2010 through 2013 by the five agencies we reviewed in our 2015 report and type of recipient, as of July 2014. The type of GLRI funding recipients vary depending on the agency and financial agreements involved. For example, NOAA has entered into agreements with a variety of recipient types, with the exception of private landowners and agricultural producers. Funding recipients are responsible for reporting information to their funding agencies about the progress of their GLRI projects. As discussed in our September 2013 and July 2015 reports, in response to the conference report’s direction to develop a multiyear restoration action plan, in February 2010, the Task Force published the Fiscal Years 2010 to 2014 Great Lakes Restoration Initiative Action Plan (2010-2014 Action Plan) to guide the activities of the GLRI for those years. The 2010-2014 Action Plan was organized into five focus areas that, according to the Task Force agencies, encompassed the most significant environmental problems in the Great Lakes: (1) toxic substances and Areas of Concern; (2) invasive species; (3) nearshore health and nonpoint source pollution; (4) habitat and wildlife protection and restoration; and (5) accountability, education, monitoring, evaluation, communication, and partnerships. For each focus area, the 2010-2014 Action Plan included long-term goals, objectives to be completed within the 5-year period covered by the plan, and measures of progress—28 in total—that were designed to ensure that efforts are on track to meet the long-term goals. Each of the 28 measures included annual targets for fiscal years 2010 to 2014. The Task Force issued an updated Action Plan for 2015 to 2019 (2015-2019 Action Plan) in September 2014 to guide the GLRI for those years. The updated plan retains four of the focus areas of the 2010-2014 Action Plan, and the fifth focus area was modified and called “foundations for future restoration actions.” As we reported in September 2013, EPA assesses GLRI progress primarily by evaluating performance toward meeting the annual targets for the 28 measures of progress in the Action Plan. In our 2013 report, we found that the 2010-2014 Action Plan did not identify the links between a focus area’s goals, objectives, and measures of progress. That is, some of the goals and objectives in the Action Plan were not linked with any measures. We recommended that the EPA Administrator, in coordination with the Task Force as appropriate, identify linkages between long-term goals, objectives, and measures in the Action Plan for 2015 to 2019. In response to our recommendation, each focus area in the updated Action Plan is associated with two or three objectives and several measures of progress, clearly identifying the links between each objective and measure of progress. In response to the conference report’s direction to establish a process to ensure monitoring and reporting on the progress of the GLRI, EPA created the Great Lakes Accountability System (GLAS) in 2010 to collect information for monitoring GLRI projects and progress. In cooperation with the Task Force, EPA also created a GLRI website, to provide information to both the public and funding recipients about the GLRI program and GLRI projects. In September 2013, we found that the information on GLRI projects in GLAS may not be complete, which may prevent EPA from producing sufficiently comprehensive or useful assessments of GLRI progress. For example, GLAS limited users to submitting information about progress using a single measure of progress, while GLRI projects may directly address multiple measures. This prevented EPA from collecting and reporting complete progress information on each of the measures addressed by GLRI projects. As a result, we recommended that the EPA Administrator, in coordination with the Task Force, capture complete information about progress for each of the measures that are addressed by a project. In response to this recommendation, EPA modified GLAS to allow GLAS users to report information in GLAS about more than one measure of progress, beginning in January 2014. In July 2015, we found that some GLAS data were inaccurate, in part because recipients entered information inconsistently due to inconsistent interpretation of guidance, unclear guidance, or data entry errors. In May 2015, while we were completing our work for that report, EPA stopped using GLAS and began using the Environmental Accomplishments in the Great Lakes (EAGL) information system to collect GLRI project information and issued initial guidance for using EAGL. EPA officials told us that the agency created EAGL and, after consulting with Task Force agencies, conducted pilot tests of the system while we were completing our review of GLAS. After the pilot tests, in May 2015, EPA officials decided to use EAGL to collect information to monitor and report on GLRI progress, and they made the system available to Task Force agencies for an initial period of data entry. In our July 2015 report, we said that this is a good first step to resolving the data inconsistencies that we identified in GLAS, which resulted, in part, because of unclear or undocumented definitions, data requirements, and guidance about entering important data.