The Chesapeake Bay is the largest of the nation’s estuaries, measuring nearly 200 miles long and 35 miles wide at its widest point. Roughly half of the bay’s water comes from the Atlantic Ocean, and the other half is freshwater that drains from the land and enters the bay through the many rivers and streams in its watershed basin. As shown in figure 1, the bay’s watershed covers 64,000 square miles and spans parts of six states— Delaware, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia—and the District of Columbia. Over time, the bay’s ecosystem has deteriorated. The bay’s “dead zones”— where too little oxygen is available to support fish and shellfish—have increased, and many species of fish and shellfish have experienced major declines in population. The decline in the bay’s living resources has been cause for a great deal of public and political attention. Responding to public outcry, on December 9, 1983, representatives of Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia; the District of Columbia; EPA; and the Chesapeake Bay Commission signed the first Chesapeake Bay agreement. Their agreement established the Chesapeake Executive Council and resulted in the Chesapeake Bay Program—a partnership that directs and conducts the restoration of the bay. The signatories to the agreement reaffirmed their commitment to restore the bay in 1987 and again in 1992. The partners signed the most current agreement, Chesapeake 2000, on June 28, 2000. Chesapeake 2000—identified by the Bay Program as its strategic plan—sets out an agenda and goals to guide the restoration efforts through 2010 and beyond. In Chesapeake 2000, the signatories agreed to 102 commitments—including management actions, such as assessing the trends of particular species, as well as actions that directly affect the health of the bay. These commitments are organized under the following five broad restoration goals: Protecting and restoring living resources—14 commitments to restore, enhance, and protect the finfish, shellfish and other living resources, their habitats and ecological relationships to sustain all fisheries and provide for a balanced ecosystem; Protecting and restoring vital habitats—18 commitments to preserve, protect, and restore those habitats and natural areas that are vital to the survival and diversity of the living resources of the bay and its rivers; Protecting and restoring water quality—19 commitments to achieve and maintain the water quality necessary to support the aquatic living resources of the bay and its tributaries and to protect human health; Sound land use—28 commitments to develop, promote, and achieve sound land use practices that protect and restore watershed resources and water quality, maintain reduced pollutant inputs to the bay and its tributaries, and restore and preserve aquatic living resources; and Stewardship and community engagement—23 commitments to promote individual stewardship and assist individuals, community- based organizations, businesses, local governments, and schools to undertake initiatives to achieve the goals and commitments of the agreement. As the only federal signatory to the Chesapeake Bay agreements, EPA is responsible for spearheading the federal effort within the Bay Program through its Chesapeake Bay Program Office. Among other things, the Chesapeake Bay Program Office is to develop and make available information about the environmental quality and living resources of the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem; help the signatories to the Chesapeake Bay agreement develop and implement specific plans to carry out their responsibilities; and coordinate EPA’s actions with those of other appropriate entities to develop strategies to improve the water quality and living resources in the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem. In October 2005, we found that the Bay Program had established 101 measures to assess progress toward meeting some restoration commitments and provide information to guide management decisions. For example, the Bay Program had developed measures for determining trends in individual fish and shellfish populations, such as crabs, oysters, and rockfish. The Bay Program also had a measure to estimate vehicle emissions and compare them to vehicle miles traveled to help establish reduction goals for contaminants found in these emissions. While the Bay Program had established these 101 measures, we also found that it had not developed an approach that would allow it to translate these individual measures into an overall assessment of the progress made in achieving the five broad restoration goals. For example, although the Bay Program had developed measures for determining trends in individual fish and shellfish populations, it had not yet devised a way to integrate those measures to assess the overall progress made in achieving its Living Resource Protection and Restoration goal. According to an expert panel of nationally recognized ecosystem assessment and restoration experts convened by GAO, in a complex ecosystem restoration project like the Chesapeake Bay, overall progress should be assessed by using an integrated approach. This approach should combine measures that provide information on individual species or pollutants into a few broader- scale measures that can be used to assess key ecosystem attributes, such as biological conditions. According to an official from the Chesapeake Bay Program Office, the signatories to the Chesapeake Bay agreement had discussed the need for an integrated approach for several years, but until recently it was generally not believed that, given limited resources, the program could develop an approach that was scientifically defensible. The program began an effort in November 2004 to develop, among other things, a framework for organizing the program’s measures and a structure for how the redesign work should be accomplished. In our 2005 report, we recommended that the Chesapeake Bay Program Office complete its efforts to develop and implement such an integrated approach. In response to our recommendation, a Bay Program task force identified 13 key indicators for measuring the health of the bay and categorized these indicators into 3 indices of bay health. With the development of these indices, the Bay Program should be in a better position to assess whether restoration efforts have improved the health of the bay. These indices will also help the Bay Program determine whether changes are needed to its planned restoration activities. The task force also identified 20 key indicators for measuring the progress of restoration efforts and categorized these indicators into 5 indices of restoration efforts. According to the Bay Program, these indices are now being used to assess and report on the overall progress made in restoring the bay’s health and in implementing restoration efforts. The Bay Program has linked these restoration effort indices to the overall restoration goals and this should help the program better evaluate the progress it has made toward meeting the overall goals. In 2005, we determined that the Bay Program’s primary mechanism for reporting on the health status of the bay—the State of the Chesapeake Bay report—did not effectively communicate the current health status of the bay. This was because it mirrored the shortcomings in the program’s measures by focusing on the status of individual species or pollutants instead of providing information on a core set of ecosystem characteristics. For example, the 2002 and 2004 State of the Chesapeake Bay reports provided data on oysters, crab, rockfish, and bay grasses, but the reports did not provide an overall assessment of the current status of living resources in the bay or the health of the bay. Instead, data were reported for each species individually. The 2004 State of the Chesapeake Bay report included a graphic that depicted oyster harvest levels at historic lows, with a mostly decreasing trend over time, and a rockfish graphic that showed a generally increasing population trend over time. However, the report did not provide contextual information that explained how these measures were interrelated or what the diverging trends meant about the overall health of the bay. The experts we consulted agreed that the 2004 report was visually pleasing but lacked a clear, overall picture of the bay’s health and told us that the public would probably not be able to easily and accurately assess the current condition of the bay from the information reported. We also found that the credibility of the State of the Chesapeake Bay reports had been undermined by two key factors. First, the Bay Program had commingled data from three sources when reporting on the health of the bay. Specifically, the reports mixed actual monitoring information on the bay’s health status with results from a predictive model and the progress made in implementing specific management actions, such as acres of wetlands restored. The latter two results did little to inform readers about the current health status of the bay and tended to downplay the bay’s actual condition. Second, the Bay Program had not established an independent review process to ensure that its reports were accurate and credible. The officials who managed and were responsible for the restoration effort also analyzed, interpreted, and reported the data to the public. We believe this lack of independence in reporting led to the Bay Program’s projecting a rosier view of the health of the bay than may have been warranted. Our expert panelists also told us that an independent review panel—to either review the bay’s health reports before issuance or to analyze and report on the health status independently of the Bay Program—would significantly improve the credibility of the program’s reports. In 2005, we recommended that the Chesapeake Bay Program Office revise its reporting approach to improve the effectiveness and credibility of its reports by (1) including an assessment of the key ecological attributes that reflect the bay’s current health conditions, (2) reporting separately on the health of the bay and on the progress made in implementing management actions, and (3) establishing an independent and objective reporting process. In response to our recommendation that reports should include an ecological assessment of the health of the bay, the Bay Program has developed and used a set of 13 indicators of bay health to report on the key ecological attributes representing the health of the bay. In response to our recommendation that the program should separately report on the health of the bay and management actions, the Bay Program has developed an annual reporting process that distinguishes between ecosystem health and restoration effort indicators in its annual report entitled Chesapeake Bay Health and Restoration Assessment.