FTA generally funds New Starts projects through FFGAs, which are required by statute to establish the terms and conditions for federal participation in a New Starts project. FFGAs also define a project’s scope, including the length of the system and the number of stations; its schedule, including the date when the system is expected to open for service; and its cost. For projects to obtain FFGAs, they must emerge from a regional, multimodal transportation planning process. The early stages of the New Starts project development process— alternatives analysis and much of preliminary engineering—are carried out in concert with the metropolitan planning process specified by SAFETEA- LU and the environmental review processes required by the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA). Alternatives analysis studies are a corridor-level analysis of a range of alternatives designed to address locally-identified mobility and other problems in a specific transportation corridor. The alternatives analysis phase culminates in the selection of a locally preferred alternative (LPA), which is the New Starts project that FTA evaluates for funding. After a locally preferred alternative is selected, the project sponsor submits an application to FTA for the project to enter the preliminary engineering phase. During the preliminary engineering phase, project sponsors refine the design of the locally preferred alternative, taking into consideration all reasonable design alternatives and estimating each alternative’s costs, benefits, and impacts (e.g., financial or environmental). Further, project sponsors are required to complete the NEPA environmental review process in order to receive federal funding. Specifically, FTA interprets NEPA to require, as part of the NEPA process for evaluation of the alternatives, an environmental review document with information on each alternative’s benefits and costs relating to the New Starts evaluation. When the preliminary engineering phase is completed and federal environmental requirements are satisfied, FTA may approve the project’s advancement into final design, after which FTA may recommend the project for a FFGA and proceed to construction. FTA oversees grantees’ management of projects from the preliminary engineering phase through the construction phase (see fig. 1). This project management oversight is conducted by FTA staff, working closely with its project management oversight contractors (PMOC), to provide continual monitoring and assessment of projects’ scope, schedule, and budget, and of its sponsor’s technical capacity. To help inform administration and congressional decisions about which projects should receive federal funds, FTA currently distinguishes among proposed projects by evaluating and assigning ratings to various statutory evaluation criteria—including both project justification and local financial commitment criteria—and then assigning an overall project rating. (See fig. 2.) These evaluation criteria reflect a broad range of benefits and effects of the proposed project, such as cost-effectiveness, as well as the ability of the project sponsor to fund the project and finance the continued operation of its transit system. FTA has developed specific measures for each of the criteria outlined in statute. However, FTA currently assigns a 50 percent weight to both the cost-effectiveness and the land use criteria when developing the project justification summary rating. The other project justification criteria are not weighted, although the mobility improvements criterion is used as a “tiebreaker.” On the basis of their evaluation measures, FTA assigns proposed projects a rating for each criterion and then assigns a summary rating for local financial commitment and project justification. These two ratings are averaged together, and FTA assigns each project a “high,” “medium-high,” “medium,” “medium-low,” or “low” overall rating, which is used to rank projects and determine which projects to recommend for funding. Projects are rated at several points during the New Starts process, including as part of the evaluation for entry into the preliminary engineering and final design phases, and they are rated yearly for inclusion in the New Starts Annual Report. The administration uses the FTA evaluation and rating process, along with the phase of development of New Starts projects, to decide which projects to recommend to Congress for funding. Although many projects receive a summary rating that would make them eligible for a FFGA, generally only a few are proposed for a FFGA in a given fiscal year. FTA proposes FFGAs for those projects that are projected to meet the fol lowing conditions during the fiscal year for which funding is proposed: deral project funding must be committed and available for the roject. The project must be in or near the final design phase and have progre far enough for uncertainties about costs, bene financial or environmental) to be minimized. fits, and impacts (e.g., The project must meet FTA’s tests for readiness and technical capacity, o remaining cost, project scope, or local which confirm that there are n financial commitment issues. SAFETEA-LU introduced a number of changes to the New Starts pr including some that affect the evaluation and rating process. For example, given past concerns that the evaluation process did not ac for a project’s impact on economic development and FTA’s lack of communication to sponsors about upcoming changes, the statute added economic development to the list of project justification criteria that FT must use to evaluate and rate New Starts projects, and requires FTA to issue notice and guidance each time significant changes are made to th process and criteria. SAFETEA-LU also established the Small Starts program, a new capital investment grant program, simplifying the requirements imposed for those seeking funding for lower cost projects e such as bus rapid transit, streetcar, and commuter rail projects. This program is intended to advance smaller-scale projects through an expedited and streamlined evaluation and rating process. FTA also subsequently introduced a separate eligibility category within the Small Starts program called Very Small Starts, which is for projects with a capital cost of less than $50 million. Very Small Starts projects qualify for an even simpler and more expedited evaluation and rating process than other Small Starts projects. FTA, like most federal agencies, must document its activities, including work related to the New Starts program, in accordance with the Federal Records Act of 1950, as amended. Each federal agency must maintain a records management program and must preserve records that (1) document the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, and essential transactions of the agency and (2) provide the information necessary to protect the legal and financial rights of the government and of persons directly affected by the agency’s activities. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is given general oversight responsibilities for records management programs and practices. The activities of an agency records management program include, among other things, the development of a records schedule—that is, for all records created and received by the agency, where and how long records need to be retained and their final disposition (destruction or preservation) based on time, or event, or a combination of time and event—subject to the approval of NARA. No record may be destroyed unless it has been scheduled and, for temporary records, the schedule is of critical importance because it provides the authority to dispose of the record after a specified time period. There is insufficient data available to determine the time it takes for a project to move through the New Starts process. Nevertheless, 9 of the 40 projects that have received a FFGA since 1997, and with complete data available, had milestone dates that ranged from about 4.5 to 14 years to complete the project development phases. However, the data from these 9 projects are not generalizeable to the 40 New Starts projects. FTA has not historically retained all milestone data for the 40 projects, such as the dates project sponsors apply to enter a project development phase, in a consistent manner. However, FTA has retained some milestone data from some projects and is taking steps to improve its New Starts data retention and collection. In addition, we found that project sponsors do not systematically retain milestone data for projects that have completed the New Starts process. Congress and FTA have taken action to expedite projects through the New Starts process through Penta-P and training workshops for project sponsors. FTA has not historically retained all milestone data, such as the dates that project sponsors apply to enter a project development phase, and FTA’s subsequent approval, in a consistent or comprehensive manner. According to FTA, its record schedule requires that FTA retain documents related to milestone approvals for 2 years after the close of the project and FTA meets this requirement. For example, FTA retains documents that notify project sponsors of their approval to enter preliminary engineering and final design. Although not required, FTA has also retained milestone data from some, but not all, projects longer than 2 years. We were unable to obtain complete and reliable project milestone data from FTA. FTA has historically retained milestone data from some projects using a variety of techniques, such as maintaining hard copies of milestone approval letters or internal memos in binders and saving electronic copies of some documents in a computer filing system. Using these sources, FTA provided us with milestone approval dates— preliminary engineering, final design, and FFGA—for the 40 projects that received a FFGA since 1997. However, when we attempted to verify the milestone approval dates from a random sample of 10 projects, we found that the data were unreliable and, in some cases, inaccurate. For example, the approval dates for some projects did not match the dates contained in the source documents (e.g., letters from FTA approving a project’s advancement into preliminary engineering); in other cases the source documents for some projects were missing from the project files. In addition to milestone approval dates, we asked FTA to provide the dates that these 40 projects began alternatives analysis and submitted applications for preliminary engineering, final design, and FFGA. Because FTA is not required by its record schedule to retain these dates, FTA was unable to provide these dates. In addition, FTA officials cited several challenges to collecting this information. First, FTA told us that it does not have records on when a project begins alternatives analysis because this phase is conducted at the local level, generally without FTA involvement.