Since the program began in June 1998, the Department has made preliminary decisions to maximize the number of first-year grants by setting suggested limits on the amount of grants available to areas with different population levels, such as areas with over 1 million people. TEA-21 requires DOT to allocate the available funding between urban and rural areas. The Department of Transportation and Related Agencies Appropriations Act for fiscal year 1999 provided DOT with $75 million for its Access to Jobs program. In addition, DOT officials noted that an average of $150,000 for each rural applicant is in line with the potential need of these areas. Grants of $1 million for large urban areas are smaller than those awarded by other federal agencies, such as DOL. In addition, DOT will give bonus points for other program elements, such as innovation. The weighted, merit-based factors may be sufficient to rank projects according to their relative merits; however, if the additional factors are needed, their use may imply that the merit-based criteria are less important than other factors, such as a project’s location, that are not based on merit. Until DOT receives and begins scoring Access to Jobs grant applications, it will not know if its weighted criteria will be sufficient to distinguish among applications or if it will need to rely on the additional factors it identified, such as geographic dispersion. TEA-21 requires DOT to coordinate its Access to Jobs activities with other federal agencies’ welfare-to-work programs. To facilitate coordination among federal welfare-to-work programs, FTA initiated a policy council in July 1998 and invited representatives from DOL, HHS, HUD, the Office of Management and Budget, and the White House to join. However, the data collected by the grantees may not measure the program’s overall performance until DOT establishes goals or benchmarks to evaluate the information it receives from the grantees. Experts Cite Evaluation as a Critical Component of Welfare-to-Work Initiatives

Experts say that evaluation is critical in determining the effect of welfare reform. DOT expects grantees to monitor the performance of their Access to Jobs project and to provide the Department with data on (1) how many transportation services the project added (service frequency, hours, and miles); (2) how the target area’s accessibility to jobs and support services improved (i.e., how the percentage of available jobs accessible to the target population by public transportation increased with the program); (3) how many people are using these expanded services; and (4) how the project’s sponsors collaborated. Specifically, it has made some important decisions about how it will distribute the program’s funds, what criteria it will use to review grant applications, and how it will coordinate the program with other federal agencies’ efforts. Scope and Methodology

To obtain information on the steps DOT has taken to implement the Access to Jobs program—specifically, to distribute funds and select criteria for awarding grants—we interviewed DOT officials; examined program documentation, preliminary reports, and other descriptive materials; and attended the October 22, 1998, conference in which DOT announced the Access to Jobs program, as well as a September 23, 1998, listening session on TEA-21, sponsored by FTA.
Why GAO Did This Study

Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO reviewed the Department of Transportation's (DOT) efforts to implement the Access to Jobs program, focusing on DOT's: (1) overall plan to distribute Access to Jobs funds among grantees in urban and rural areas; (2) criteria to award specific Access to Jobs grants to states, localities, and other organizations; (3) efforts to coordinate the Access to Jobs program with other welfare-to-work programs; and (4) proposals to evaluate the program's success.

What GAO Found

GAO noted that: (1) DOT has decided it will distribute the $75 million available for the program in fiscal year 1999 to as many people as possible by setting suggested limits on the amount areas can receive on the basis of their population levels; (2) under this approach, DOT intends to provide first-year grants that average $1 million for large urban areas and $150,000 for rural areas; (3) DOT will use four key criteria for evaluating grant applications on the basis of their merits; (4) DOT will assess each grant application and assign points on the basis of these criteria, as well as bonus program components such as particularly innovative transportation approaches; (5) whether these criteria will enable DOT to make sufficient distinctions among the many applications it expects is unclear; (6) accordingly, DOT may use other factors; (7) however, DOT may unintentionally suggest that merit-based criteria used to score applications are less important than other factors that are not based on merit; (8) DOT has made efforts to coordinate its Access to Jobs program with other welfare-to-work programs; (9) DOT established a policy council of representatives from four other federal agencies and the White House and it met with local human service organizations; (10) because grantees can use other federal funds to match the DOT's grants, sustained coordination between DOT and other federal agencies, as well as sustained collaboration among local agencies, is critical for ensuring the effective use of federal welfare-to-work programs; (11) as part of its evaluation effort, DOT will require Access to Jobs grantees to collect data on four important program outputs: (a) the number of new and expand transportation services; (b) the number of jobs made accessible by public transportation to the targeted riders; (c) the number of people using the new transportation services; and (d) the level of collaboration achieved; and (12) however, the data alone will not be sufficient to measure the program's overall success because DOT has yet to establish goals or benchmarks against which the cumulative data on new routes, new system users, and newly accessible jobs can be compared.