The White House has $8.2 billion for the EPA in its fiscal 2014 budget request, a decrease of $296 million, or 3.5 percent, below the 2012 enacted level.
The budget request proposes modernizing the agency by consolidating positions and restructuring the workforce to ensure the agency has the necessary skills for the current state of environmental protection efforts, and supports investment in the E-Enterprise initiative as a means of using data and evidence to improve program performance.
E-Enterprise is planned as a website that can support environmental protection transactions – processing permit applications, for example – and that can facilitate program implementation.
The E-Enterprise initiative will start by assessing and updating current business processes and implementing the IT systems needed to transition from paper to electronic reporting, which will reduce the reporting burden on industry, as well as encourage greater transparency and compliance, according to the budget request.
It also describes plans to restructure the workforce, focusing on matching the right skills with program implementation and utilizing best management practices, and says some positions are to be consolidated and reconfigured to reflect environmental protection efforts that increasingly rely on advanced monitoring tools and IT for data-driven analyses and targeted enforcement and compliance activities.
