Children's Health Program Lacking

EPA's Office of Children's Health Protection & Environmental Education (OCHPEE) lacks a strategic plan for how it will integrate children's health into other EPA programs, does not actively communicate with those program offices, and has no system for measuring its performance, finds an EPA Inspector General (IG) report released on April 5. "OCHPEE's lack of strategic planning, identified goals, adequate measures, and quantifiable accomplishments results in its inability to demonstrate its role and value added to the protection of children's health," the report concludes. EPA is in the process of reorganizing OCHPEE and claims that once the process is finished, it will have addressed the IG recommendations. Similar recommendations were made in a 2004 IG report, but EPA did not follow through with them. The report comes just weeks after the Government Accountability Office testified at a congressional hearing that EPA has not made children's health a priority.