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Federal agencies have made “solid progress” toward addressing the management challenges in programs on GAO’s “high-risk” list but much remains to be done, GAO has said.

In the latest version of a report issued every other year at the start of a new Congress, GAO said that of the 32 programs on the prior list, 23 have now partially or fully met all five criteria for taking a program off the list—leadership commitment, agency capacity, an action plan, monitoring, and demonstrated progress.

However, only one program was removed from the list: managing terrorism-related information. GAO said that “significant progress had been made to strengthen how intelligence on terrorism, homeland security, and law enforcement is shared among federal, state, local, tribal, international, and private sector partners.”

Meanwhile, three others were added, bringing the total up to 34. In GAO’s words, these are:

“Management of federal programs that serve tribes and their members. GAO has reported that federal agencies, including the Department of the Interior’s Bureaus of Indian Education and Indian Affairs and the Department of Health and Human Services’ Indian Health Service, have ineffectively administered Indian education and health care programs and inefficiently developed Indian energy resources. Thirty-nine of 41 GAO recommendations on this issue remain unimplemented.

“U.S. government’s environmental liabilities. In fiscal year 2016 this liability was estimated at $447 billion (up from $212 billion in 1997). The Department of Energy is responsible for 83 percent of these liabilities and DoD for 14 percent. Agencies spend billions each year on environmental cleanup efforts but the estimated environmental liability continues to rise. Since 1994, GAO has made at least 28 recommendations related to this area; 13 are unimplemented.

“The 2020 decennial census. The cost of the census has been escalating over the last several decennials; the 2010 Census was the costliest U.S. Census in history at about $12.3 billion, about 31 percent more than the 2000 Census (in 2020 dollars). The U.S. Census Bureau plans to implement several innovations—including IT systems—for the 2020 Census. Successfully implementing these innovations, along with other challenges, risk the Bureau’s ability to conduct a cost-effective census. Since 2014, GAO has made 30 recommendations related to this area; however, only 6 have been fully implemented.”

In addition, two areas of concern have been expanded–mitigating gaps in weather satellite data, and management of federal oil and gas resources–due to “emerging challenges related to these overall high-risk areas.”