In December 2014, we reported on the progress the departments that coordinate federal emergency support functions (ESF) have made in conducting a range of coordination, planning, and capability assessment activities. For example, all 10 ESF coordinators identified at least one nonemergency activity through which they coordinate with their ESFs’ primary and support agencies. Further, all 10 ESF coordinators identified at least one planning document—in addition to the information contained in the NRF’s ESF annexes—that they had developed for their ESFs to further define the roles, responsibilities, policies, and procedures for their ESFs’ coordination and execution. We found, however, that the ESF Leadership Group and FEMA, as the group’s chair, had not worked with other federal departments to issue supplemental guidance detailing expectations for the minimum standards for activities and product deliverables necessary to demonstrate ESF preparedness. In the absence of such guidance, we found that ESF coordinators are inconsistently carrying out their emergency response preparedness activities. We also found that, while federal departments have identified emergency response capability gaps through national- level exercises, real-world incidents, such as Hurricane Sandy and other assessments, the status of federal interagency implementation of these actions is not comprehensively collected by or reported to DHS or FEMA and, as a result, DHS’s and FEMA’s ability to assess and report on the nation’s overall preparedness is hampered. Further, we found that FEMA’s plan to lead interagency actions to identify and address capability gaps in the nation’s preparedness to respond to improvised nuclear device (IND) attacks did not contain detailed program management information—such as specific timeframes, milestones, and estimated resources required to close any given capability gap—which is needed to better enable ongoing management oversight of gap closure efforts. In our December 2014 report, we recommended that FEMA—in collaboration with other federal agencies—(1) issue supplemental guidance to ESF coordinators detailing minimum standards for activities and product deliverables necessary to demonstrate ESF preparedness, develop and (2) issue detailed program management information to better enable management oversight of the DHS IND Strategy’s recommended actions, and (3) regularly report on the status of corrective actions identified through prior national-level exercises and real-world disasters. DHS concurred with our recommendations and FEMA has taken actions in response. For example, in June 2015, FEMA issued guidance for ESF coordinators that details minimum standards for activities and product deliverables necessary to demonstrate ESF preparedness. The ESF Leadership Group established a set of preparedness performance metrics to guide ESF coordination, planning, and capabilities assessment efforts. The ESF Leadership Group-generated metrics set standardized performance targets and preparedness actions across the ESFs. Collectively, the metrics and reporting of these metrics should provide an opportunity to better measure preparedness efforts by assessing if ESF coordination and planning is sufficient, and whether required ESF capabilities are available for disaster response. In addition, FEMA developed a detailed program plan to provide a quantitative analysis of current work and addressing existing capability gaps linked to a project management tracking system to identify specific dates for past, present and upcoming milestones for its IND Program. We believe that FEMA’s actions in these areas have fully met the intent of these two recommendations. FEMA officials also collected information on the status of National Level Exercise Corrective Actions from 2007-2014, an important step to respond to our other recommendation and we are continuing to monitor FEMA’s efforts in this area, however it has not provided a timeframe for its completion. We recently reported in September 2015 on FEMA’s progress in working with its federal partners to implement the National Response Framework (NRF) Emergency Support Function #7 (ESF 7) Logistics Annex. We found that FEMA’s efforts reflect leading practices for interagency collaboration and enhance ESF 7 preparedness. For example, FEMA’s Logistics Management Directorate (LMD) has facilitated meetings and established interagency agreements with ESF 7 partners such as the Department of Defense and the General Services Administration, and identified needed quantities of disaster response commodities, such as food, water, and blankets. Additionally, FEMA tracks the percentage of disaster response commodities delivered by agreed-upon dates, and available through FEMA and its ESF 7 partners. Regarding FEMA’s support of its state and local stakeholders, we found that FEMA could strengthen the implementation of its Logistics Capability Assessment Tool (LCAT). For example, FEMA—through LMD and its regional offices—has made progress in offering training and exercises for state and local stakeholders, developing the LCAT, and establishing an implementation program to help state and local stakeholders use the tool to determine their readiness to respond to, disasters. However, we found that, while feedback from states that have used the LCAT has generally been positive, implementation of the program by FEMA’s regional offices has been inconsistent; 3 of 10 regional offices no longer promote or support LCAT assessments. Further, LMD did not identify staff resources needed to implement the program, and did not develop program goals, milestones, or measures to assess the effectiveness of implementation efforts. In our September 2015 report, we recommended that FEMA identify the LMD and regional resources needed to implement the LCAT, and establish and use goals, milestones and performance measures to report on the LCAT program implementation. DHS concurred with the recommendations and is taking actions to address them. For example, FEMA officials said they intend to work closely with regional staff to identify resources and develop a plan to monitor LCAT performance. We also reported on the status of FEMA’s development of the Logistics Supply Chain Management System (LSCMS) as part of a broader look at 22 acquisition programs at DHS, in April 2015. We reported that, according to FEMA officials, LSCMS can identify when a shipment leaves a warehouse and the location of a shipment after it reaches a FEMA staging area near a disaster location. At the time of our review, LSCMS could not track partner organizations’ shipments in route to a FEMA staging area, and lacked automated interfaces with its partners’ information systems. We also reported that DHS leadership had not yet approved a baseline establishing the program’s cost, schedule, and performance parameters. According to FEMA officials, FEMA’s partners and vendors can now receive orders directly from LSCMS and manually input their shipment data directly into a vendor portal, providing FEMA with the ability to track orders and shipments from time and date of shipment to the estimated time of arrival, but not the in-transit real-time location of shipments. They also said that the program baseline was still under consideration by DHS leadership at the time of our review. In addition, DHS’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) issued a report on LSCMS in September 2014. The DHS OIG made 11 recommendations designed to address operational deficiencies that FEMA concurred with, such as identifying resources to ensure effective program management and developing a training program for staff. As of July 2015, FEMA officials report that 5 of the OIG’s recommendations have been implemented, and the agency is taking steps to address the remaining 6 recommendations. In addition to these completed reviews of preparedness efforts, we currently have work underway for this committee assessing how FEMA’s regional coordination efforts support national preparedness. Specifically, we plan to assess and report on FEMA’s management of preparedness grants, implementation of the National Incident Management System, and interactions with regional advisory councils later this year. In September 2012, we reported on FEMA’s processes for determining whether to recommend major disaster declarations. We found that FEMA primarily relied on a single criterion, the per capita damage indicator, to determine whether to recommend to the President that a jurisdiction receive Public Assistance (PA) funding. However, because FEMA’s current per capita indicator at the time of our report, set at $1 in 1986, did not reflect the rise in (1) per capita personal income since it was created in 1986 or (2) inflation from 1986 to 1999, the indicator was artificially low. Further, the per capita indicator did not accurately reflect a jurisdiction’s capability to respond to or recover from a disaster without federal assistance. We identified other measures of fiscal capacity, such as total taxable resources, that could be more useful in determining a jurisdiction’s ability to pay for damages to public structures. We also reported that FEMA can recommend increasing the usual proportion (75 percent) of costs the federal government pays (federal share) for PA (to 90 percent) when costs get to a certain level. However, FEMA had no specific criteria for assessing requests to raise the federal share for emergency work to 100 percent, but relied on its professional judgment. In our September 2012 report, we recommended, among other things, that FEMA develop a methodology to more accurately assess a jurisdiction’s capability to respond to and recover from a disaster without federal assistance, develop criteria for 100 percent cost adjustments, and implement goals for and monitor administrative costs. FEMA concurred with the first two recommendations, but partially concurred with the third, saying it would conduct a review before taking additional action. Since that time, FEMA has submitted a report to Congress outlining various options that the agency could take to assess a jurisdiction’s capability to respond to and recover from a disaster. We met with FEMA in April 2015 to discuss its report to Congress. FEMA officials told us that the agency would need to undertake the rulemaking process to implement a new methodology that provides a more comprehensive assessment of a jurisdiction’s capability to respond and recover from a disaster without federal assistance.