captioning performed by vitac what's the importance of cultural appropriately shared interventions across communities. how can one learn from simply implementing the mental health services needed, for example, insecteral cooperation that would benefit multiple communities. another takeaway was the solution studies of these problems need to be solution focused instead of problem focused. so, again, how do we focus on health, how do we focus on strengthening health, even while we're trying to reduce risk and trying to reduce bad outcomes.

communities and clin igss and governments and others needs to know what works in order to know what to implement more widely. a number of questions arose, how do we do that? how do we know how communities define what works? that's not always the same as the way researchers define what works. how do decisionmakers define what works and how do the different perspectives intersect? finally as i mentioned, they noted there were two studies of interventions with the rigorous evaluation. opportunities that we see from the u.s. perspective for building on communities, first of all acknowledging that these kinds of problems need shared knowledge and tailored efforts. but when we're tailoring intervention interventions, how can we be sure that others are learning from those interventions? if they are successful, what's required for implementation. and once an intervention is implemented, how can one ensure

that the intervention can be sustained? so how can the results of successful interventions be communicated to decisionmakers to aid sustainability? and one answer may come in how we approach testing the efficacy of these interventions and that includes figuring out how re can harmonize to provide a shared language to community different stake holders. an important issue arose in the conversations and that is that if we want to think about wellness and health, there are many slices to the pie. focusing on the health sector alone is not sufficient, one has to think about the economic sector and we talked about this, economy, education, the physical environment, climate. and also remembering social history and how that influences the way the people respond to current challenges.

so the u.s. proposed project under the arctic council was called reducing incidents of suicide and indigenous groups or rising sun. the context for this was remembering that as i've shown you in the first slides, there's an elevated risk of suicide in these remote rural arctic communities. we also are talking about communities with considerable cultural diversity and often very small populations. so the standard approaches that researchers tend to use to evaluate the efficacy and effectiveness of interventions is quite challenging. what might be a way to get around some of those things? there are also important assumptions and those are that efforts also have to continue, of course, beyond what's proposed under the u.s. chairmanship and under the sustainable development working group specifically and that these proposed projects like rising sun can move the agenda

forward but they have to happen in concert with broader ongoing efforts for service delivery for research and these other intersecteral interventions as well. some of the questions that rising sun hopes to answer are can lessons about the impact of suicide prevention interventions be learned from information across more than one arctic community? would this be facilitated by identifying common measures to assess the outcomes of interventions and what are some of the underlying themes that are most frequently measured across these interventions? so what might this look like? we know there say big body of existing interventions out there, some of which were highlighted in canada a few weeks ago. and those interventionss targeted policies and health systems and some are clinic-based and some more community level

interventions focusing on bringing youth in particular back to -- back in touch with their cultural traditions and some of them are focused at individual levels. what we hope to do is prepare a tool kit that takes into account these various levels of intervention and meaningful outcome measures. that can be used to harmonize the evaluation and enable communities to measure what's relevant to their needs and would enable the sharing and comparing of data across studies of effectiveness. and this we hope will be able to be amenable for community use that will -- and will take into consideration what communities value in terms of outcomes that will take into consideration the kinds of data that subnational governments are currently using in value in terms of outcomes and will also use the expertise of searchers working on methods appropriate for this kind of evaluation. thank you. [ applause ] >> thank you very much, pamela,

dr. michael bruce. >> can we pull up the slides? there it is. okay. thanks very much for having me here to speak to you about cdc's role in activities in regards to human health in the arctic and the subarctic. i'm going to work off a series of slides. this is a slide that shows you sort of cdc's assets in the arctic. and i work with the arctic investigations program, 33 people total. we also have a quarantine station there focused infectious diseases. we have the national institute of office of occupational health and an atsdr office. so our mission at arctic

investigations program is to prevent infectious disease of people in the arctic and subarctic, with a specialty on high concern among indigenous people. our priority areas are surveillance of infectious diseases and emerging diseases and reducing health disparties preparedness and response and leadership in sircircumpolar health. one of them is international surveillance and we're the headquarters for a circumpolar network looking at different infectious diseases across the arctic. that map shows you in the darker color the countries that participate in the invasive bacterial surveillance disease network and we recently added tb on. if it was a map with tb, russia would be included also. some of the things that can come out of this network, we've been able to identify outbreaks of infectious diseases across the different countries and been able to identify new emerging

infections in these countries. and we've actually been working over the past decade to identify a new infection that has a case fatality rate of about 10% in our children. we worked closely with the canadians in particular, the canadians have high disease rates also, to work on this issue. and we also work with the international union for health, i'm the former president of the union and work with american society and also the former president of that and we work mainly through a variety of different infectious disease working groups. and these working groups fall within the union's purview. we also work with the u.s. interagency arctic research policy committee. there's a cdc rep from our office that co-chairs that

meeting and dr. roger glass, i believe also co-chairs from nih and he's here today. we also work with arctic council particularly we have a representative from our group that say member of the arctic human health experts group and that has been dr. alan parkinson, but now will be dr. tom hennessey who is my boss, and the director of the arctic investigations program. and they advise the sustainable development working group of the arctic council. then we've been working on a number of health initiatives in alaska. one is the alaska water and sewer challenge. and i'll tell you more about that in subsequent slides but one of the things we're trying to do is take a local alaska specific initiative to improve water distribution and sewage system availability to people and internationalize and expand it to our international partners.

we also work within a group called the one health working group in alaska that's led by the alaskan tribal health consortium. that's looking at human and animal and environmental health. i'm going to speak about water sanitation and health in alaska. in alaska we're behind in terms of rural alaska in terms of the percentage of homes with complete plumbing. if you look at this graph, you can see that on the x axis is decade. on the y axis is percentage of homes with complete plumbing. in the u.s. we went from 55% in 1940 up to 100%. and lower 48 states, alaska is pretty high. but in rural alaska, as of 2010, draw a line across, we're where the u.s. was in 1959 in terms of plumbing. we're pretty far behind.

and these are some pictures of a village in rural alaska. about 25% of villages in rural alaska have no running water or sewer. the picture on the upper left is a person going to a water distribution point filling a plastic bucket with water and then in the upper right, he dumps it in a big plastic garbage can and that's the water source in the home. that's where they pull their water out of. in the lower left is the toilet. that's what we call a honey bucket. it's a bucket with a toilet seat on it. you can see the right side picture next to it, someone is emptying that in a receptacle, they have to carry it and slosh it around and spill and dump into receptacle. in the winter it gets cold and they dump the frozen blocks into the sewage lagoon and alaska we call those poopcicles.

if you're rationing water in the village, your priority will be for drinking and cooking and a much lesser priority for personal hygiene washing clothing, and cleaning the home. when people think about water borne disease, most people think of pathogens in the water causing illness. we think in alaska, water washed diseases are probably of greater importance. that is people rationing water, they are not washing their hands, there's lack of water for hygiene and that allows for person to person transmission of a variety of different infectious diseases. we've done a number of different studies in alaska. this is one slide on the x axis. you can see proportion of homes served with piped water on the y axis and rates of illness in children less than 50 in alaska and see that in villages with less than 10% of running water,

the invasive pneumococcal rates are high, 400 per 100,000. as the water service increases, the rates of disease go down. we've seen this for a number of other diseases also. so increasing the proportion of alaskans with access to waste water services is quite important to alaskans and one of the 25 leading health indicators for healthy alaskans 2020. at baseline in 2010, about 78% of rural homes had running water. the target for 2020 is 87%. when i pulled this off the web, that red stop sign signal means we're not on target to reach our 87% of water distribution systems to rural homes, which is a bit alarming. one of the things that we've done in response to this that actually isn't me, it's the

department of environmental conservation at the state of alaska, has put forth the alaska water and sewer challenge. this is the website at the bottom if you want more information. this is a challenge that was put out to ask for teams to come together and propose decentralized water distribution systems for rural alaska. there are many places in rural alaska that will never have piped water, where the substrate, you can't put in pipes. there are other places where it probably isn't affordable. we need some alternate technologies, in innovative technologies to help us with this. these teams, the work they do is private sector driven. they need to be able to provide sufficient water for health. it needs to be affordable for the homeowner and long term

operability and they need to get user input from communities. right now they are evaluating the six teams and will hone it down to three. those three teams proposals are going to be implemented in rural villages and we're going to look over a period of years to see how they do in terms of health outcomes and engineering and did it work and then in terms of acceptability within the community. and so that's actually ongoing right now. and then this is just one of my last slides just thinking about the upcoming u.s. chairmanship of the arctic council and water and sanitation initiative, i guess some of the deliverables that we have for this are -- we're planning on a white paper looking at water and sanitation across the arctic, looking at populations within home water service and challengers and proposed solutions. we're going to be traveling less than two months to the finland

international congress and discuss with our international partners and planning on a water and sanitation conference bringing together circumpolar partners and internationalizing the alaska water and sewer challenge for all of the arctic. we're sponsoring that in anchorage, in september of 2016 looking for innovations in water distribution for small communities. we have many partners in this effort that i have listed up here and for the sake of time, i'll say thank you and that's it. [ applause ] >> thank you very much, michael. timothy? >> we're going to pass the keyboard down.

i think you have to advance it one. oops. i like that picture. fish was that big. there we go. the other way. go the other way. go the other way. are we not hitting right button? oops. there is always the technology challenge. okay. why don't you start your presentation and we'll catch up. >> okay. >> ad-lib. >> yes. i've been asked to talk about the arctic human development report which recently came out as heather said it was i guess it came out a couple of months ago but dated 2014. this is the second arctic human development report and first

published in 2004. one of the things -- well, going through my slides already, it was put together by a number of different teams or some 27 lead authors three lead editors, very international team drawing from across the arctic. here we go. >> she took your keyboard. she's going to bring it back. >> okay. across the arctic. this is not a research report necessarily, it's more of a review of research that other people have done so yeah, done under the auspices of sustainable development. we have a number of target audiences. one of them is obviously the arctic council and policy makers in the arctic and others in the arctic like yourselves. what we found is from the first arctic human development report colleges and universities use this report rather extensively,

these are the different chapters in the arctic human development report. i'm the lead author on the migrational poll but i'll focus on the chapter of human health and well being. we had a number of guiding questions of the author and author teams were asked to address, one was how does the arctic differ from outside world and core of the arctic states? certainly look at issues of ethnicity and how those affect populations of the arctic. climate change was a factor also. and certainly regional variations among the different parts of the arctic and i'll highlight some of those. and also those last bullet points, how did the -- what were the changes over roughly the first decade of the 20th century since the first arctic human development report. but focusing on health

disparities or health and issue of disparities, continuing health disparities is an issue. the previous speaker is highlighted and in this chapter that's a trend highlighted in a number of different places, disparities between indigenous and nonindigenous people. i pulled in section from the report and i think in heather's report, this different grouping, nordic country's overall high health indicators, not large disparities between the different peoples and then the kind of western-northern american arctic, rather good health indicators overall but between indigenous and nonindigenous, greenland, regions high disparities between those places and canada and

denmark. then the russian arctic which i'll highlight overall poor health indicators in general. this is from -- just one of the short example this is from the health atlas. what he does, he contrasts infant mortality between greenland and denmark and the story is greenland is 30 years behind denmark in reducing infant mortality, the two lines converge rather nicely but 30-year generation gap, this is from my chapter again, highlighting these regional disparities among the 27 or so arctic regions. you can see here there's a huge difference between the fair islands, ice land, some of these places and then going down -- international -- according to the u.n. definition.

this huge difference and where you have a life expectancy of 58 years, large difference between men and women. life expectancy for men is 53 years. and one of the factors that drives a lot of the overall disparities is the differences between men and women. on the left side are the russian regions where men -- women outlive men by over a decade. and these are some extremely large differences possibly some of the largest in the world. and the point is, when you have roughly half of your population with a low life expectancy, you're going to have low overall life expectancy. infant mortality shows somewhat the same trends. the highest rates of infant mortality are in some of these prominently indigenous regions or countries, greenland, going

down to places like iceland and some of the nordic countries which are really having among the lowest levels of infant mortality in the world. but just one thing i want to highlight, i put the whole world in less developed countries to show even though these are high relatively to some of these countries, the arctic and arctic regions actually you know exist within highly developed high income countries. there's possibly some hope or something that can be drawn upon there. apologize for the quality of this graph but basically the point of this shows the trends in tb across the circumpolar regions. the first one is canadian, inwit and natives. you can see the large declines in tb but kind of continued disparities in tb. this -- one of the previous speakers talked about suicide.

this is from some work that jack hicks has done. looking at suicide rates in canada and then among the inuet, you can see the trend for canada is flat. and the trend in nunavut continued to go up. jack is a rather cheerful guy and this is rather depressing research to do. he correlates this with various historical events and clustering of suicides. if there is one, there tends to be several. this is from some work i did. this shows the sex ratio of males to females in russia. this is 1989 prior to the break-up of the soviet union. you can see most of the arctic, northern regions have much higher male sex ratio than the rest of the country. this is because the demands of industry and industry can draw

more men than women. as the -- i do a lot of research on migration, looking at the changing sex ratios in the arctic, i'll be telling a migration story and men with cope with down sizing and arctic and northern economy and migrating out. you can see declining male sex ratio, only a quarter is due to migration. three quarters of it due to the fact that men are dying in larger numbers than women in russian north. if we keep going down, this male sex ratio continues to decline. these gaps in life expectancy, russia overall has among the highest female advantages and life expectancy and some of these regions it's extraordinarily high. i speculate that is probably among the highest in the world. the first arctic human development report really focused on health in the chapter was called health and well

being. this one tries to push that one a little bit and look more broadly at all indicators of well-being. suicide intervention has to go beyond just looking at what the health or health care sector can do. probably hard to read. charts on the right show the trends in gdp and trends in life expectancy over the first decade of the 20th century. and green shows improvement and red shows decline. most of the arctic countries, generally been an improvement in life -- improvement in both in life expectancy and in gdp. and there's -- what the arctic human development reports, subsequent reports to that, they take the u.n. human development

index through three components of that but then they try to add others that are kind of arctic specific, control cultural identity or language retention things important particularly to people in the arctic. so to conclude, in has been a lot of research on health and health well being of indigenous people. previous speakers talked about this in the chapter and the report talks about that. there's been a number of different research intervention efforts underway to improve the health and well being of people in the arctic. one of the takeaway messages in the report is that there has been considerable improvement in a lot of areas of health. i pointed out life expectancy and others. but there are issues health issues in the arctic that remain rather intractable. when i showed them about suicide and tb and some others, some sexually transmitted diseases and domestic violence, just

don't really show any sign of improvement i think in the report talks about the warming climate and how this may impact water, food security, certainly some infectious diseases and things like that. lastly, senator murkowski talked about the importance of educating the next generation about the arctic and i think some other speakers mentioned that as well. i'll finish with this slide. this shows my young 2-year-old daughter looking at the arctic human development report when it came in. notice the smile on her face and the thrill with this. she was actually born and raised during my writing of this whole thing. so i'll stop there and take any questions you may have. [ applause ] >> thanks very much, we heard a lot about suicide, heard a lot

about water and sanitation, both with respect to the work on your way specific to alaska but also work that is under way in the broader arctic council context. i take that to mean from certainly the cdc and nih perspective that these are the areas where there's the greatest promise and there's an agenda formed up and a way forward. i also took away from listening to your presentations and listening to tim that we need to be quite realistic, that there are -- there are some significant barriers to really carrying forward that agenda or other broader infectious diseases agendas. the huge variation as you pointed out, huge variation culturally, demographically, and geographically, across these

different communities and across different sovereign entities. we didn't talk much about what the political barriers might be in terms of getting cooperation within the council on some of these very sensitive and culturally based problems, and we didn't hear much about the questions of prioritization across the constituent governments that we're talking about to what degree are these issues. some issues within a broader health spectrum, to what degree are these becoming prioritized and is there political will and financial resources and commitments to try to move this agenda forward. so on the one hand, we have the u.s. coming into the chairmanship next week. we have these -- this body of work out there, we have the human development report out, there's a lot of new content to move forward. there's a lot of active ongoing work. but what can we -- what should

we realistically expect in the two-year, the period of the two-year chairmanship in moving the agenda forward. both at home and in the state of alaska, but on the broader context. of the arctic council. maybe i could ask pamela and michael to say a few words about sort of what your hope is given that mix of both opportunities that have arisen all of the good works that you've done and some of the questions around what is this environment? what are we likely to see in this period? how do we set our compasses in a realistic way? pamela and michael? >> i think one important aspect of the chairmanship is bringing attention to these issues, the mental health needs in the arctic and alaska specifically and attention to where the risks

are and what resources we have to build on. that's one important issue. from the nih certainly will continue to fund research to answer these questions in alaska specifically and as well as in other -- in other sites as relevant. but i think that's a big one. and i think the opportunity to have a mental health project as one of the sustainable development working group projects invites this collaboration across countries to address these issues. as i mention the presentation, the project in sustainable development working group is one such thing but within nhs with respect to mental health interventions, the substance abuse and mental health services administration continues to support work on service delivery for mental health as well as for substance abuse and suicide

prevention. they in fact just released an rfa earlier this month for tribal communities on suicide prevention intervention. so to make a long story short, there are many things happening in concert but i think this is a great platform to bring attention to an area that often does not get the kind of attention it needs in the global health context particularly and with respect to thinking about the disparities in mental health that are clearly evident. >> you do feel that the -- the groundwork has been done in terms of the rising sun, a consensus among the constituent governments of the arctic council, that this framework -- there is a buy-in for this framework, preliminary buy-in to move this forward? >> when you say groundwork, so yes, this has been a proposed project that has been reviewed

by the various members of the arctic council. and that at this point, we do have buy-in from countries that would like to join us in this work. we're looking forward to it. >> what is it going to take in your estimation to bring it to life and carry it forward? >> so for that specific project, there will be -- it will take country partners that will commit funds to move that project forward and i think we're expecting some of those kinds of commitments to occur and we'll certainly hear more about that after the u.s. officially assumes the chairmanship. so yes commitment of time commitment of funds commitment of expertise and commitment of helping us to gain access to those networks out there that bring access not only to the experts but also to the community members who we hope to engage in this process as well. >> michael on the arctic water and sanitation initiative, if you could say a few words about

how much consensus exists today and what is it going to take to really move this forward in the next two years? >> sure, yeah, i guess i would second pam's comments in terms of increasing and strengthening our collaboration with our international partners. i've been working in arctic for my 16th year. when we started the circumpolar surveillance system, it focused on invasive bacterial diseases but there's a lot more out there beyond just a narrow focus on infectious diseases and i think broadening that with our partners is very important. but with a focus on health. and so we've tried to address many of the health -- number of different health issues in alaska, but current focus is on water and sanitation. one of the reasons for that, i said a little bit about it earlier.

we have piped water to about 78% of those rural villages but there's a significant portion that don't have it. and may never get it. so what do we do? one of the interim steps we had taken was to develop small hall water systems into these villages. so if you have a small haul tank in your home, you can truck water to the home and fill the tank and you can have faucets and have a shower and have some water in the home in that respect. as it turns out, that model doesn't deliver a lot of water into the home. so what we've learned is that homes that have honey buckets that have basically no system other than a central watering point where you go fill up buckets, they deliver 1.5 gallons of water per person per day.

if you have a small haul system, they deliver about 2.5 gallons of water per person per day. the w.h.o. recommends a minimum of 13 to 15 gallons per person per day. if you look at what the use is in the united states in general, we generally use about 50 gallons per person per day. so our villages in alaska are doing extreme, extreme water rationing and we know that this isn't just true for alaska. there are other areas in the arctic, some of our other neighbors in the arctic and northern canada and greenland and northern russia, also have issues with remoteness and water and sanitation and so what we're hoping to do -- and we've done this with surveillance, we're hoping -- we've learned many things from our partners. we're hoping that this alaska initiative on water and sanitation that i explained to you a little bit earlier, can

potentially be used as a model and help in pushing that model forward to develop these technologies across the arctic. >> tim, this 10-year study, the new study for the first time in a decade, it's very comprehensive, and it's ensik encyclopedic. how is it going to be used by the leadership of the arctic council to move an agenda forward? >> well, not exactly sure, but it's -- i think one of the things we were supposed to do is to highlight some of these differences and to put this out there in front of them and say, you know, especially since this was the second arctic human development. the first was really kind of a stock taking.

there wasn't a lot known. like i said, this wasn't necessarily new research. it was kind of pulling together existing data and pulling together from a number of scientific studies and like i said one of our mandates was to look at some of the trends over time. all of of the chapters do that economic chapter, my chapter, certainly the health chapter. i think what we've done is we've looked basically over the first decade of the 20th century since the first report and said, okay, we identified and hope i brought some of these out, these are areas where there's generally been improvement. things are getting better in certain areas but this chapter is certainly highlighted areas where there hasn't been improvement and hasn't been improvement in specific arctic regions or across the arctic and the issue of suicide and these others that i've mentioned are intractable diseases, the issue of domestic violence keeps coming up again and again.

so hopefully, the arctic council an other people interested in the arctic can look at this and say, okay, these areas are getting better but there's -- there's other areas that are actually not getting better and those are maybe the areas that we need to -- there needs to be some focus on. >> could you say a few words about the u.s. calculation in this. you know the policy environment here, you know the history of the u.s. engagement on these arctic issues. you talk all the time with the administration around these issues. what can we hope for in this next phase in terms of prioritization and leadership on these issues. and will they take up your recommendation? >> well, here's hoping. well, you know, i think that the really disappointing thing i guess is about 12 or 18 months ago, it was put forward to the office management budget to

create a budget for the u.s. chairmanship so there would be extra funds. it would be given to implementing some of these key priorities and fortunately, they said that was not a good idea and that budget did not exist. what is happening is we have these fantastic priorities but agencies, this is again the theme we raise for senator murkowski, going to have to use existing resources and try to squeak reprioritize and we know in this budget scarcity, this is really difficult. that was step one. we missed a huge opportunity that i think what the u.s. chairmanship is going to be is a lot of really good projects and piloting projects, modeling projects that we will showcase, but frankly the funding will not be sufficient to boost them. great work being done but boy, they need turbo charged budget. i never like to end on a pessimistic note. the white house did -- has a new body in place, the arctic

executive steering group, which is led at very senior levels. they have been charged with doing a gap analysis. it's -- if you dare to read the white house's implementation plan for the national strategy for the arctic region, short little title, we do see where in the implementation plan there are clear outlines for -- and i quote, to coordinate better comprehension of the health and survival rates of arctic indigenous people to facility tail well-being as an objective. i hope this gap analysis says we have the u.s. chairmanship theme is arctic improvements and arctic economic and living and well being conditions. we have great things but there are not funding. we are going to prioritize this and put funding. i would argue for the state of alaska, it is an absolute tragedy to hear some of the figures that you've cited.

it's appalling. it's unacceptable, leadership begins at home. we need to start focusing our time and attention on americans that are suffering from these conditions. and then exactly we need to pull this out and provide that leadership effort circumpolar. pam, my concern about the sustainable development working group, the sdwg it is the mother ship of the working groups. it is a monster working group. and that's where i think it gets stuck because it does so much. that's why i think it's absolutely vital that we pull this out and say, look, if we're serious about this, we're going to put those resources and hold those arctic governments to account and say, let's put that money in and my frustration quite frankly with the arctic human development part, it's not an arctic council product. it's not. that's a problem because if it's not a product, you go that's a lovely report, thank you very much and then keep going to our regular business.

this is exactly what we need these wonderful assessments and reports, we need to hold governments accountable for how are they moving the measure. i love that stop sign. the arctic council needs that graph and stop signs. you promise this, you ministers, you sign and said we agree with this but our governments have done nothing about who's holding them accountable. this is part of the arctic council's governance requirement but it comes from leadership from national councils. i think we have an opportunity here and it's -- to raise public awareness absolutely but we must start making the tough budget choices, show me, show me that money. and so far we've said it's important but we haven't reflected it's important in our budgets. it begins with our budget. i would encourage them to be much more generous, so easy for me to say, we've got to start addressing these challenges. >> thank you very much.

let's move to our audience. we've got 15 minutes. let's collect several bundled together several interventions, we have one here and one here and one there. yes, sir, please identify yourself, be very succinct and offer a quick comment or question. >> first of all, i completely support your recommendation. bless you, sister. i would take health out of sdwg as fast as i possibly could. that sdwg has too many things in it. and also structural, it should not in my personal opinion be head of delegation and have a service officer brand spanking new every two years. that causes difficulties. and the other foreign ministries do the same thing. we need to get subject matter experts for this and specifically on how dr. collins, thank you so much. i'm so pleased to see you

involved in this activity. it's a challenge. part of the tyranny is the small numbers of people. you can have discussions in full in other places and they will point to the large numbers of deaths in sub-saharan africa. if you're allocating funds you try to go with numbers of people, but these are citizens. a question for you, you mentioned rigorous evaluations. samsa funds a lot of services. some people would argue that's really not looking at the root cause researchwise in terms of suicidality. at the commission we tried to get an institute of medicine study focusing on this and we failed because we did not adequately engage with the alaska native communities in developing this and explaining what an oim study was explaining how committees are formed and how editorial control is done.

do you think an iom study if we tried again would be a useful way to do a rigorous evaluation of this issue in the north? and loaded on that question is, very hard to get capacity, even if you have money oriented towards these problems, hard to get capacity, no medical school in alaska, not a lot of investigators to keep people interested in grant in this kind of work. iom and how do we build capacity even if there is funding? >> thank you. >> sir? >> good afternoon, charles newsted, state department and hasten to add i'm speaking for myself not the department, find myself in the basement without a telephone. i'm very impressed by the broad scope and expertise that this panel represents. it's truly impressive.

and i'm also very impressed with the way that you and your colleagues have drawn international cooperation into play in dealing with the arctic. that's vitally important. the main thing is money and bottom line. found -- and i think most people would agree with this, international scientific cooperation is a great multiplier how much you can do with your budget. i applaud your efforts in that way. and now my specific question, i'm wondering if the panel could compare in the various different fields the health situation in russia, various regions, compared with that in the west with alaska and canada and greenland, et cetera, and final question is has mr. putin made -- he's trying to become a

czar again as we all know. has he had some effect on the arctic yet? is that discernible? and is that good or bad? >> thank you so much. there was a hand -- thank you. yes, please. >> linda fernandez. i have a question combined with a suggestion. you did mention a circumpolar water sanitation conference scheduled for next year, perhaps as a result of what would be a success of the alaska water and sewer challenge that is going to be magnified to the panarctic. i guess i have a suggestion as well as a question. are you teaming up efforts with all the international collaborators during world water week that's convened in sweden every year? has great buy in across a lot of international countries.

as well as private sector organizations like rotary international, whl. it's clear to me that while you made great strides in having the partners involved, some of what in having the arctic partners involved, some of what you're suggesting as technology developments on sanitation and water have been addressed in other settings with the arctic partners perhaps engaged differently. so i'd make a suggestion and question whether you can in fact synchronize efforts and join in with that group? >> thank you very much. are there any other comments or questions at this time? yes, please. >> hi, i'm michelle lerner coming from a sort of different perspective. i work for bread for the world institute, and we work on hunger and malnutrition advocacy. so, my question is just in general, would you consider that malnutrition or food insecurity lack of money, clearly -- how do

you think that's impacting the health of people in the arctic? >> thank you. okay, so, we have a question around should there be an iom study, would that be useful? what's the comparison russia versus the west? i think we're going to turn to tim on that although i think everyone here will have something to contribute on that and what impact putin. what about tying to water week in sweden and then the food insecurity issue. michael, why don't we start with you and just sweep down this way? >> okay. i think the first question relevant to me was sort of a question from the gentleman from the state department about the health situation in russia versus other circumpolar nations. and i have to say that i know very little about, at least in regards to water and sewer in russia. my focus has been on infectious disease, and we've had some collaborations with the russians and eastern russia on a number of a variety of different

infectious diseases. and i know that in many of those areas, there are issues with infrastructure and there's poor infrastructure, so there certainly is a great possibility that there are issues with water distribution and sewage in russia versus the other countries, but i can't tell you for sure. the next question was are we teaming up with partners at world water week in sweden. i would like to speak to you more about the world water week in sweden, because i actually am not aware of that meeting and we probably should be attending. we've had some of our circumpolar partners in some discussions regarding sanitation on water and health but they haven't been formalized. they're through our international collaborations on infectious diseases. so i'd be very interested in learning more and we certainly should attend that meeting and learn from them. so, thank you.

and then from the woman at the barefoot world institute in regards to food insecurity. i'm an infectious disease epidemiologist -- oh, i'm sorry. i'm an infectious disease epidemiologist, and food insecurity is not something i am a specialist in. i know as an alaskan that it is an issue particularly in rural alaska in relation to climate change and melting of the permafrost, because many of the native peoples put food in food lockers buried in the ground in the permafrost, and as the permafrost melts or as there's increased erosion into the village, those food lockers are failing. so, food insecurity is definitely an issue in rural alaska as well as other places in the arctic. and i think i went through the questions. >> sure. so, in response to you, john

farrell, i'll start with the research capacity, because i think that's critical in places where you don't have a lot of researchers. one response is to try to develop a cadre of researchers that can actually -- that will have some commitment and some insider understanding of the context. so, we certainly do need to see more research career development in the context of alaska. so, i would certainly support that. and i think that means a number of things. that means figuring out how to establish mentoring for students, that the idea of pursuing research as a career option becomes a feasible and realistic idea. it means working with institutions in order for them to develop an adequate infrastructure and base for training and sustaining young researchers and researchers throughout their career as well. so, yes, i agree that that would be important, particularly in the context of mental health research.

some of those efforts are under way at nih, where there are initiatives that focus on american indian and alaska native research capacity-building, and we need to continue those efforts. with respect to the iom meeting i think i would probably ask you again, that sounds like how much buy-in is there in the local context for that? to me that seems like that would be one starting place to make sure you've got all of your stakeholders in alaska being of a single mind about pursuing something in that direction. but certainly, whatever avenues whether it's an iom report whether it's some other avenue to bring attention to the needs and to rigorously document where we are with respect to effective interventions in these contexts it would be an interesting intervention. >> well, just thank you. wonderful questions. two quick comments.

first, a preview of coming attractions we'll be releasing, hopefully in june, a major study on the russian arctic to help us understand. you heard on the energy panel, russia has enormous economic stakes in the arctic. they have a long history in writing very comprehensive and detailed strategies. some of those strategies quite interestingly -- and kaitlin has been a great student studying these strategies -- they do have a very robust sustainable development component. but as the russian economy continues to experience extraordinary difficulties you know, this is going to be a challenge for them to sustain their very ambitious strategies. but we need to understand what's important, why is the arctic so important to russia and my thesis is that we're actually seeing some significant and certainly disturbing changes in russia's arctic policy particularly after the crimea

annexation that we need to understand and study that more. so, thank you for your question. coming to you soon in a comprehensive report. and just one final comment on sort of, you know, the world water week. i think what we're starting to see, and we need to do a much more purposeful job, there's an arctic diplomacy that is starting to be formulated. so, countries that are working together in the imo, international maritime organization, were so instrumental in pushing through a new mandatory polar code. we are going to see i think a similar arctic caucus -- those are my words -- at the paris climate summit at the end of this year, saying how are we focusing governments because the climate change is occurring in the arctic two to three times faster than anywhere else on the globe. could we have in governmental agencies and bodies in water and sanitation, where is the arctic subgroup that's pushing this agenda? we have to think where issues

sectorially cross and let's gather the eight arctic council members, let's gather the observers, if they have a role to play. how can we caucus in these variety of international forum and say let's put the arctic on the agenda. that's something we need to push, whether it's world water week or at these very different u.n. platforms. where the arctic's voice and how can we push the agenda? >> thank you. tim? >> i'll address the question about the comparisons between russia and the united states in terms of health indicators life expectancy, et cetera. i have done a lot of research on russian demographic issues. russia, more so than other countries, seems to be extremely susceptible to economic downturns. you can kind of correlate you know, declines in gdp per capita with declines in life expectancy, certainly after the breakup of the soviet union, the kind of economic downturn was the transition. things improved and then things

got worse with the '98 ruble crisis. and i haven't checked the numbers, but i think there's been some increase in the death rates over the last year or so with this economic downturn. you know it's hard to say why, but i mean, there's -- it just seems to be more, like i said, more so than most other countries. and we had our financial crisis in the late 2000s, and life expectancy didn't drop by three or four years all of a sudden because of that. but in russia especially among men -- i mean that seems to be a particular trend. and like i highlighted here, these gaps in life expectancy between men and women but overall life expectancy in these arctic regions, especially if you go certainly further out into siberia they're extremely low. and i haven't seen anything where that's a priority of the russian government to address some of these issues. maybe around the margins, but i

mean, they're -- i forget the name of the institute, but there was an institute for the arctic indigenous peoples. that's been kind of abolished. and i just don't think it's a priority like it is in the u.s. so, i'll end on that pessimistic note. >> well, we've gotten to the end of our time now. i think this is, just in closing, this is a very, in a way a very opportune year. i mean, we have the arrival of the u.s. chairmanship, we have the sustainable development goals coming forward in september, we have the paris climate change at the end of the year, the summit. there is going to be multiple opportunities to sort of move this forward. i want to thank tim pamela and michael for bringing the enormous expertise that you have in your respective areas around

the arctic. it's really been kind of astonishing to just listen. and we know you had to travel a bit of a distance to get here and carve out some time, and we're very grateful to you for doing that. and heather, thank you so much for your leadership in all of this. i mean watching you over the course of this morning has just exhausted me. >> well thank you. >> congratulations. and thank all of you for your great questions and comments and your patience in sticking with us. and so, thank you all and we're adjourned. >> thank you.

taking you live now to a senate foreign relations subcommittee hearing. holding a hearing this morning on the management of the state department. they'll be hearing from the inspector general about the state's efficiency and effectiveness. steve linick there seated already at the witness table. republican david perdue of georgia chairs the subcommittee expected to start shortly live here on c-span3.

>> expected to start shortly here, the senate foreign relations subcommittee holding a hearing on the management of the state department. and also later today, let you know that v.a. secretary robert mcdonald will testify before a senate appropriations subcommittee on the v.a.'s budget request for the next fiscal year. nearly $170 billion spending plan for the v.a. for disability compensation, pensions and other benefits. we'll have live coverage of that hearing at 2:30 eastern time. that will be right here on c-span3. and then getting under way on our companion network, c-span a

senate finance committee hearing on u.s. trade policy with chamber of commerce president tom donohue and a fnkfl-cio president richard trunka. you can find that shortly on our companion network, c-span. just waiting for this hearing to start about the state department. we'll be hearing from the inspector general about states' efficiency and effectiveness.

meeting will come to order.

both of us are in order, so we will proceed. this hearing of the subcommittee on state department and usaid management, international operations and bilateral international development is entitled "improving the effectiveness of the state department." i'd like to begin by welcoming our witness, inspector general of the state department and broadcasting board of governors steve linick. steve, thank you for being here today. i understand you changed your schedule to be here today, and we very much appreciate that and look forward to your testimony. the lyg is dedicated to assessing the state department's programs and operations and making recommendations to strengthen its integrity effectiveness and accountability. as such, the oig is dedicated to detecting and preventing waste fraud, abuse and mismanagement. today's hearing will be an important opportunity to examine state oig's mission and oversight efforts. your new initiatives and to hear about any challenges that you face in carrying out your mission.

it has come to our attention, mr. lynninick, that there are a number of things we can do in the state department in helping you with your job. i look forward to discussing that with you this morning and to get your insights. as you may know chairman corker's leading the effort to draft and pass into law the first state department reauthorization bill in 13 years. we certainly welcome your suggestions. with that, i'd like to thank and recognize our ranking member, senator kaine, and look forward to working with you on these important issues. senator kaine? >> thank you mr. chair and thanks to our witness steve linick. we do begin hearing as part of a set of hearings about state department authorization. as chairman perdue mentioned we haven't done this in over a decade, so it's very important that we get to this work, and today's hearing is part of that effort. thank you for the testimony today and testimony before other senate committees recently. and i also want to highlight your service as an assistant u.s. attorney in virginia from 1999 to 2006.

you've got a long and distinguished track record as a public servant. oigs serve an essential and critical role in holding government agencies and officials accountable to citizens. there is a trend toward use of oigs not just in the federal government, but in state and local governments as well, which is very positive. one of the newest state ig offices was created in virginia in 2011. and i look forward to your assessment of your office's strengths, challenges and priorities based upon your 19 months as service to the department of state. i know that you've highlighted a couple of issues in your testimony i'm particularly interested in -- ongoing coordination of oco accounts used in iraq afghanistan and elsewhere. i also want to make sure that we can discuss what we can do together to ensure that the department of state is more quickly complying with and implementing important oig recommendations. but thanks again for your service, your testimony today and i believe this can be a

helpful exchange as we work toward the broader issue of both the effectiveness of your office, but state department reauthorization. thanks, mr. chairman. >> thank you. and then we're going to hear from our witness inspector general steve linick. mr. linick? >> chairman perdue, ranking member kaine members of the subcommittee thank you for inviting me to testify regarding the work of the office of inspector general for the department of state and the broadcasting board of governors the bbg. today i will be addressing four topics. first, i'm going to start by giving you an overview of oig's missions and priorities. second, i'm going to describe some new initiatives my staff and i have put into place since i was sworn in almost 19 months ago. next i'm going to discuss some of the most significant challenges facing oig, specifically, and the department as a whole. and finally i'm going to talk about the impact of oig's work. let me start with an overview. because oig's focus is on the operations and work of the state department and the bbg, its inspectors, auditors investigators and evaluators

focus on u.s. government operations worldwide involving more than 72,000 employees and 280 overseas missions along with oversight of the departments and the bbg's significant domestic operations. but our office is unique from others because oig has historically, and as required by law, served as the department of states inspection arm. let me turn to priorities. first, protecting people who work in the department is our top priority. oig has inspected physical security at overseas posts for years. however, since the september 2012 attacks on u.s. diplomatic facilities and personnel in benghazi, libya oig has stepped up its oversight efforts related to security. there is no doubt the department has made progress in improving overseas security. nonetheless, challenges still remain. through our inspection and audit work, we continue to find notable security deficiencies placing at risk our posts and personnel. second, oig has enhanced its

efforts to oversee the department's management of contracts and grants, which total approximately $10 billion in 2014. contract and grant management deficiencies including lack of training, weak oversight and inadequate monitoring have come to light repeatedly in oig's audits inspections and investigations over the years. lastly, we continue to be very concerned about the department's management of i.t. security. oig's assessments of the department's efforts to secure its i.t. infrastructure have found significant recurring weaknesses including inad qualt controls around who may access and manipulate systems. i now turn to new oig initiatives. since joining the oig, my staff and i have implemented a number of new practices intended to enhance the effectiveness of our work. we have adopted the practice of issuing management alerts and management assistance reports in order to flag high-risk issues requiring immediate attention. another new initiative has been our creation of a new office in oig, the office of evaluations

and special projects also known as esp. this office complements the work of oig's other offices by focusing on high-risk special projects and evaluations of pressing concern to the department, the congress and to the american people. we also have enhanced our efforts to identify and refer appropriate cases to the department for suspension and debarment. next i would like to address two significant challenges facing oig that i believe impede oig's ability to conduct effective oversight. first, although the inspector general act requires oig to be independent, my i.t. infrastructure lacks independence because it is largely controlled by the department. while we have no evidence that our data has been compromised, the fact that the contents of our network may be accessed by large numbers of department administrators puts us at unnecessary risk and does not reflect best practices on i.t. independence within the ig community. second, unlike other igs, my

office is not always afforded the opportunity to investigate allegations of criminal or serious administrative misconduct by department employees. department components, including the bureau of diplomatic security, are not required to notify oig of such allegations that come to their attention. if we are not notified, we have no opportunity to investigate. this arrangement is inconsistent with the inspector general act and appears to be unique to the department. the departments of defense justice, homeland security, the treasury and the irs, agriculture and interior defer to their igs for the investigation of criminal or serious misconduct by their employees. their igs have the right to decide whether to conduct the investigations themselves or refer them back to the agency components. particularly where senior officials are involved the failure to refer allegations of misconduct to an independent entity like the oig necessarily creates a perception of unfairness as management is seen

to be investigating itself. finally, i would like to close by talking about the impact of our work. in my written testimony i quantified some financial metrics demonstrating our positive return on investment to taxpayers. but financial statistics do not adequately reflect some of our most significant impacts -- the safety and security of people and the integrity of the department's operations and reputation. those are key motivators for our employees, many of whom are on the road for long periods of time or would serve for extended periods at dangerous posts. i am honored to serve alongside and lead them. in conclusion, chairman perdue ranking member kaine members of the subcommittee, thank you again for the opportunity to testify before you today. i take seriously my statutory requirement to keep the congress fully and currently informed and i look forward to your questions. >> thank you mr. linick. i appreciate your comments. we will begin -- i will begin the questioning today. we'll have seven minutes.

senator kaine and i are the two members here. as the members join us we'll have them engage as well. my first question follows some testimony that you gave about 2012 and the attacks there on u.s. diplomatic personnel in benghazi. the oig since then has stepped up its oversight efforts as you testify. can you describe what those efforts are to improve the physical security? and also, how do you go about evaluating the security of other embassies around the world? >> senator, we actually assess security in two ways. first of all we've looked at security from a systemic point of view. in a 2013 report on the accountability review board process, we looked at how the department implements accountability review board recommendations across the

board. the accountability review board as you know, is convened by the secretary, where there's loss of life substantial injury, et cetera. we found in that report that after reviewing 126 recommendations from 12 different arbs between darus alum and benghazi, 20 of the recommendations were repeat recommendations, pertaining to security, intelligence-gathering and training. and we found the reason why that occurred is because of a lack of sustained commitment over the years by department principals in making sure recommendations were implemented. in fact, we found many of the same recommendations in the accountability review board for the benghazi to be the same recommendations. >> i'm sorry would that go back years, that practice of having recommendations like that, you know, the past decade or so? >> yes, sir. we looked at 14 years worth of recommendations over 12

accountability review boards. >> okay. >> and we found that in order to properly implement those recommendations, accountability had to be at the highest levels of the department. we've made recommendations to that effect. we also look at security on a more targeted basis. as you know, we conduct inspections of posts around the world. every single inspection we do of an embassy involves a security inspection. we have highly qualified security inspectors who look at everything from whether or not the walls are high enough to whether or not there's a proper setback to whether their emergency action plans are properly in order. and we do that across the board and you know we do continue to find deficiencies when we go to various locations. the other way we do it is through our audits and we do audits of various programs. for example we reviewed the

local guard force that protects our embassies whether or not they're properly vetted by security contractors who hire the guards and whether they are properly overseen by our regional security officers who have responsibility for making sure that they're doing their job. so, those are the ways in which we conduct our inspections. >> how often do you do those inspections? >> well we do about eight -- let's see, every eight years, we're able to perform a domestic inspection, and every eleven years an overseas inspection. we try to get to as many locations as possible. but really we use a risk-based approach. so, we do a survey and we find out if there are problems at any particular posts. we also look at a post and assess whether it's receiving a large amount of money for foreign assistance. if it's a high-threat post we

will take that into consideration as to whether or not to go to a particular facility. and now that we have responsibility for joint oversight of the operation inherent resolve we look at posts that play a role in that effort. >> well i just returned from a trip out there and i can tell you that the state department people are an amazing group dedicating their careers to multiple assignments around the world, changing every few years. i was very impressed with their morale and their effectiveness out there. i'm encouraged by your testimony. i did have one question though. you testified that you're having trouble with the five-year inspection requirement. help me understand what's involved in that as well. >> so, the foreign services act requires our office to conduct inspections once every five years. and i just want to just step back and make one observation about that.

we are unique among the ig community in that we have a statutory requirement to conduct these inspections, because we're also doing audits and investigations. so, that, obviously, reduces our ability to do some of the other work. but on the five-year inspections, we're not able to meet that requirement. we simply don't have the staff. but i really think that a better approach frankly, is to do it on a risk-based approach like we're doing it now. we try to get out to posts where there are truly, you know where there are truly issues whether we think they are financial issues or some of the other issues that i just mentioned, but we're not able to get out every five years and it would take an extraordinary increase in staff and resources in order to be able to do that. >> all right. let me change gears just a minute. as we work on this reauthorization bill in the full committee, what opportunities for increased effectiveness do you see? and this is a long-winded

answer. i'll have time to come back. i've got about a minute left, so if you would give me just the highlights here. in terms of improving effectiveness at the state department. if you had the top two or three priorities, what would you recommend, based on all of the work that you've been doing? >> in terms of items that would help the ig perform its job? >> right right. >> so i would say there are two issues that come to mind. number one is our ability to get early notification of misconduct involving serious or criminal activity and our ability to investigate that, at least decide whether we are going to investigate that and return it back to the department. so, that's sort of the number one. the second issue is what i mentioned in my oral testimony, is i.t. independence. we really need to be independent from the department. we have a lot of sensitive information on our network. so, i would say those two things would be on the top of my list.

>> okay. well, thank you, mr. linick. my time is up. i'll yield to senator kaine. thank you. >> thank you, mr. chairman. i think my questions are going to go significantly more than seven, so i'll just do seven and then we'll probably have second rounds. and mr. linick, i'll take them in the order that you did. i'm going to go missions and priorities, sort of new missions and then challenges. on the missions and priorities i'm glad that your first one is protecting embassy personnel. like chairman perdue i've been so proud of the people that i've met. you know, when you go to that id yod of facilities that we have around the world, you really are proud of the people. i went to the u.s. embassy in beirut. and when you see the memorial there to all of the folks in the state department who lost their lives in the '80s and '90s, it's very sobering and the sacrifices are sometimes more mundane than that but they're sacrifices of being away from family and serving in tough places. so, that's got to be number one. your written testimony suggests

that you think that the focus on security improvements has not been one that is i guess been subject to sustained oversight from the state department leadership. i think that's the word that you used, in particular with respect to arb recommendations following benghazi. but i think more generally, when there are recommendations about security improvements, it sounds as if what you're testifying is that there's sort of really sharp focus on it, but then maybe wavering attention because of other priorities. could you elaborate on that a little bit because that should be all of our concern. >> let me say this, i think the department has taken significant steps in addressing our security recommendations. in fact we are currently reviewing the department's compliance with the benghazi arb recommendations. there are 29 of them. >> yep. >> so i'm encouraged by the steps they're taking. in terms --

>> is that the kind of thing where you'll issue a report about, we've reviewed compliance with the benghazi arb recommendations and here's our assessment? is that foreseen? and when might that happen? >> yes, sir. we are actually in progress with that report, and we should be issuing something probably in the next couple of months on that. >> okay. >> but in terms of implementation of recommendations, i think you got it right when you said, what happens is if they're not implemented from the top, they tend to be delegated out to the bureaus, and there's a dispersion of authority. so, implementation, the responsibility is delegated down the chain. with the changes of administration institutional shift, there tends not to be the follow-through that you would want to see, especially with the benghazi -- excuse me, the arb recommendations over the years,

and there hasn't been a loop back to the principals, the deputy secretary, the secretary on the progress of implementation of those recommendations. so, what we're trying to say is, look accountability for those recommendations needs to be at the deputy secretary level. and i know the department is working on that and we're assessing that right now. >> one of the areas that i was very concerned about in reading the arb report -- and you may just want to highlight this briefly, because if you're going report about this, we'll get the full report later -- but is the use of private contract security at some of the embassies or consulate facilities whether there is sufficient vetting when private contract security is used. i know in benghazi some of the private contract security were local folks. they were on sort of a work stoppage because of debates about pay that, you know, could have led them to be less than i mean frankly less than focused on doing the job because of some dispute with the state department over that.

how was your review going on this question of do we appropriately vet local security when we hire them abroad? >> so, that is an area of concern to me, because all it takes is one bad actor who's guarding our embassy for something to happen. and we did do some work on vetting security guards. we looked at six of them at various posts around the world, including some high-threat posts, and we found that all of them were not thoroughly vetting security guards. and again, you know, you have to make sure these guards don't have criminal background criminal histories and there's a whole panoply of qualities that you need to check. so not only do our -- not only do the companies who hire these guards have responsibilities but also the department does in making sure they know who's guarding their embassies. so, we found problems with that and this is an issue which we're pursuing. we're currently looking at the employment, how vetting is going

with the locally employed folks at our embassies as well. so, this is just -- this is a constant issue that i think deserves a lot of attention, because i've said, all it takes is one bad actor. >> is the responsibility for doing the vetting of local security fully on the state department's shoulders, or do the marine security guard units that are assigned to diplomatic posts have any responsibility over that role? >> no, the responsibility is really on both the contractors who are hired, but ultimately, it's the regional security officer who needs to make sure that he's satisfied with the guards that are selected. >> it segues nicely into your second mission which is managing contracts and grants. i mean, security contracts are just a kind of contract. i'm on the armed services committee, and we have a readiness committee hearing this afternoon where acquisition reform and managing contracts and grants is going to be the topic. so i think this is a

big-picture issue. and i notice that the next mission and priority you have of your three is maintaining i.t. security, and i would suspect that that may also tie into the managing contracts and grants, because i would imagine that some of that within the state department is done by outside contractors. am i right about that? >> i think that's right, yes. >> i've often heard it said in the northern virginia contracting community which is pretty big, there's a lot of general concerns about sort of the acquisition and grant management workforce. so, to what extent, you know, to the extent that you have an opinion about this, in managing contracts and grants or maintaining i.t. security to the extent that it's contracted out, are there issues kind of on the personnel side about the size, the qualifications, you know the numbers or the qualifications of our acquisition workforce that manage these contracts and grants? >> well i think that -- i guess

there are two issues here. we have definitely identified issues with the folks who are supposed to be managing the contracts at the department. there's not enough of them. and we're doing one audit right now where we found that a contractor was submitting invoices, but the invoices -- there weren't enough contracting personnel within the state department to oversee those invoices, so they were just basically signing off without validating them and double-checking them. so, there's that issue. there's an issue of lack of training. as well we need contracting officers grant officers who understand all the rules and so forth. we have a problem with the rotation. our rsos our regional security officers at posts are also responsible for overseeing contracts and grants and they're rotating in and out, so there's a lack of continuity there. so, there's sort of a whole host. and there's also another significant issue is the maintenance of our contract files. we recently did a report where

we looked at contracts over the last six years and found that there were $6 billion worth of contracts that were either incomplete or missing. now, since then department has found some of those contracts. but you know if you don't have the contract files, if you're a contracting officer, how do you ensure that the government is getting the goods that it's bargained for? >> i'm over time, but i'm going to come back to this when i come back. i'll pick up right there when i come back. mr. chair. >> thank you ranking member. senator johnson, you're up. >> thank you mr. chairman. inspector general linick, in your testimony, you're talking about a review that your offices has conducted. i don't believe -- was that under your guidance on the arb with benghazi? >> no the benghazi ar bank completed right before i got there. >> but you have reviewed the process of that arb, is that correct? >> well, since i arrived we've undertaken work to see how the

department is complying with the benghazi arb recommendations, the other 29 how are they doing, what progress have they made. >> that's what i glean from your testimony. do you have any plans whatsoever of still trying to get some answers to a number of unanswered questions that certainly i have in terms of you know, who knew what when whatever happened to security quests where were those security quests denied? where were the requests denied where security was turned down in benghazi? are you taking a look at that because the arb has not answered those questions. we've had several probes and i know there's a special committee in the house trying to get answers. but we're very frustrated. this is 2 1/2 years since the tragedy at benghazi and we still don't know some very basic answers to some very basic questions. >> well, there have been a lot of probes as you've mentioned, on this topic. we have been forward-looking. we've taken our resources and

tried to figure out whether or not the department is currently complying with security guidelines and so forth and whether they are implementing the arb recommendations. that's the direction we have been going. >> which is important. you know obviously, we have to look forward. we need to make sure that, you know these tragedies don't occur in the future. but from my standpoint one of the primary functions of the inspector general's office is not only that transparency, and not only the recommendations that are forward-looking, but also looking back and being the whole people accountable. and i'm just not aware that you know, i think the primary actors in the benghazi instance have been held accountable. do you believe so? >> you know we didn't look at that. obviously, the benghazi accountability review board made a number of conclusions on that. again, there have been a lot of reports, a lot of probes on that. you know, i'm happy to work with the committee if you think i should be looking at something in particular -- >> oh, i do. >> as i said i've been trying to take our limited resources and make sure that, at least try

to make sure that we don't have another tragedy again through our inspections and so forth. obviously, we'll never be able to stop them completely, but that's -- >> i guess one of the things i'd like to do is we had deputy secretary kennedy in front of our homeland security committee subcommittee. this was in the last congress. and i took that occasion, because he refused the invitation to testify before this committee on the same day. so, i took that opportunity to ask him a series of questions, which i did not get very forthright answers in the committee. and then we submitted those questions for the record, which we have not gotten any reply to whatsoever. so i'm not quite sure how we can hold an administration accountable, how we can hold those officials that were at the heart of the matter, that made the key decisions that i think, you know, that were really derelict in their duty that resulted in the death of four americans, if we don't know who made the decisions. how do we actually hold people accountable?

>> look accountability is obviously part of our job, and we try to hold people accountable in the department through a variety of mechanism, through investigations, our inspections, audits. the three -- there are three areas which i think pertain to accountability. one is accountability for implementing arb recommendations over time, and that's something that we have been focusing on heavily. the other is accountability for making sure our contracts and grants are overseen properly and our contracting offices are held accountable. the other area's making sure that there's accountability for the i.t. network which has huge vulnerabilities. >> well, as you're aware, i'm certainly highly supportive of strengthening the office of inspector general, your ability to access information. i'd like to be able to strengthen congress's ability to actually get information from this administration. one of the things i will do is we'll submit a letter to you asking those exact same

questions, and maybe you can have greater success in your role within that department as the independent auditor the office of inspector general. maybe you can get some of these questions that not only i think you should be asking not only should i think the administration be asking not only do i think this congress should be asking, but i think they're questions to answers that the american people deserve. the american people deserve to know the truth. they haven't got it yet. so, i'll submit that letter to your office and i would appreciate the help of your office in trying to get those answers for the american people. >> yes, sir. >> thank you, mr. linick. thank you, mr. chairman. >> thank you. mr. linick we're going to go start a second round. i know the ranking member's got other questions. i've got a few here. i'd like to change directions and talk about the i.t. point that you brought up in your testimony this morning. you mentioned that there have been attacks on the state department's network and that that compromises the ig's work relative to being on the same network. can you talk about that in a

little bit more detail and talk about what you're doing to protect your independence and whether you need to be totally independent on a separate network? i mean, what is your recommendation there? what are you doing to protect ig's independence? >> i think that your point is well taken to the extent that the department suffers from attacks. we suffer from attacks because we're on the same network. we've taken a number of steps since i've been in office. first of all we've asked the department to agree not to come on to our system without asking permission. and we have finally gotten that agreement from the department. but we need more than that because right now we are sort of in a gated community, if you will, where we rent -- our i.t. system is, we rent our i.t. system, and the i.t. folks at the department have the keys to our i.t. system.

so, they really have unfettered access to the system. if they wanted to they could read modify, delete any of our work. we have sensitive grand jury materials, we have long -- >> i'm sorry to interrupt. how far down in the state department organization does that access -- is that access provided? is that throughout the organization or -- >> well, it's state department administrators have access to our system as well as any other system. >> so, during an investigation, your files are open to the hierarchy of the state department? >> well, they're not open but if an administrator wanted to -- and again, we don't have evidence of this -- if an administrator wanted to he or she could come on to our system with their access. that's the problem. they come on to our system as it is with security patching and all, for legitimate reasons. >> so how is that done in other departments? >> well, at the very basic level, departments differ in the way they handle it.

generally, you know there's a firewall or some sort of form of protection against that type of intrusion, because an ig just can't protect confidentiality of witnesses and information if there is a possibility. now, the other way some igs do it, and this is the way i did it when i was the inspector general at the federal housing finance agency, i had a completely separate system and network with my own e-mail address. i was completely off the department's grid. >> what keeps you from doing that here? >> well i need money and i need the department's cooperation. i would like to be completely separate from the department to ensure the integrity of our system, but i also need the department to give us access to the same systems that we have now, and i've actually broached this topic with the secretary last friday and deputy secretary

higginbottom. >> do you have evidence that the state department's network has been attacked, and does that affect you guys? >> there has been -- there's evidence that it's been attacked and it has affected us. i can't really go into details because of the nature of the information. >> i understand that completely. so, what are you doing to protect the independence and how can you, short of separating yourself on a separate network, which takes money, as you say, to protect the independence of your investigations? >> well, we've taken the first step in getting the department to agree not to come on to our system, but the next step is developing a firewall around our network. and again this really depends on the department's willingness to do this quickly with us. the other thing we're trying to do -- we have published four, what's called fisma reports, over the last four years, where we found recurring weaknesses in the department's system, and that's given us a lot of pause

because i'm not so sure, if we have problems in the department's system, that obviously leads to vulnerabilities in our own system. >> so, let me just be clear. are you -- don't let me put words in your mouth but are you getting cooperation from the organization the state department organization with regard to this particular i.t. issue, relative to independence? i think independence is critical if you're going to be objective in your evaluations. you've got to have access, but you also have to be protected in terms of the information confidentiality, as you just said. is it a cooperative attitude that you're seeing? i mean is this something that's moving forward? can we bank on the fact that this is going to get taken care of or do we need to talk to the other members of leadership in the state department? >> well, i know that deputy secretary higginbottom is looking into this issue and she's been very receptive and helpful to us in general. i will say the process has been very slow.

it took us months just to get the bureau of diplomatic security to sign an agreement not to come on to our system. without approvals. and that's only in limited circumstances. so, it's a slow process it's a big bureaucracy. and so, i'm cautiously optimistic. >> well, good. i'm going to yield the rest of my time and allow -- or ask senator murphy to have access to his questions now at this point. thank you. >> thank you very much, mr. chairman. thank you for being here today. i note that your official title is inspector general for the u.s. department of state and the broadcasting board of governors, and so i wanted to ask you just a few questions as to the second appendage on your title. you know, the work of the bbg is perhaps more important now than ever as we're fighting very sophisticated propaganda campaigns from non-state actors like isis or boko haram, but

also from state actors like russia in their efforts to try to essentially buy up press outlets all around their periphery, having an efficiently run broadcasting board of governors and all of their constituent entities is critical to the work that we do abroad. and yet, the previous reports on both the work culture and the efficiency of the operation have been damning, to say the least. i mean, you very rarely get ig reports that are as straightforward as at least the 2012 report was about the work culture at the bbg and you had a much older report i think from 2004-2005, that talked a little about just tremendous levels of redundancy and duplication within the organization. so, i guess my question is open-ended. i would just be interested to hear any updates that you have

on what follow-up there has been at the broadcasting board of governors following that 2012 report whether you have information to suggest that the kind of inefficiencies that were identified in earlier reports still exists and whether that's going to be a subject of further introspection or examination for your office moving forward? >> well, thank you for that question. the bbg, i would say, is a work in progress, because as you noted, we did issue some damning reports within the last couple of years, primarily focused on leadership. it's a part-time board. there are conflicts of interest. they didn't have a ceo. we recommended that they hire a ceo. apparently, the ceo has only been in place -- there has been a new ceo, but apparently, he's left. so, it's without a ceo again. there were morale problems. i must say in the contracting and grant area there's room for improvement. we issued a report recently on

their acquisitions, and we found violations of the antideficiency act, conflicts of interest problems with their grants. so, it continues to be a problem. i know that the new folks who are over there are trying to address these issues. and we're working with them on following through. we actually issued some recommendations on contract and grant management pertaining to the bbg, and they're actually required by the appropriations committee to respond to some of those recommendations. so, this is a work in progress. we're on it. and we'll keep the committee briefed on this issue. >> again i sort of, you know, read it as two different sets of problems. you've got a leadership vacuum there that continues and leadership deficiencies, and

then you've identified structural issues with respect to how they contract. and also, again, an older ig report talked about tremendous redundancies, duplication. you reference it as a work in progress, which is often a way of talking about something that's slowly getting better but far too slowly. do you -- if you identify those two problems as distinct is one getting better at a rate that's faster than the other? is one a more lingering and festering problem than the other? >> i would say i think the leadership issue is probably getting better at a faster rate. there's a new board member since we issued our report and so forth, and i think they're really trying to address those issues. i think the contracting issue is not so much a structural problem, but just complying with the rules. the federal acquisitions

regulations, just doing it right. so, i know they're working on that as well. since we have a more recent report on that, i would say that's probably the more pressing issue at the moment. >> there's a bipartisan group of us in the house and the senate working on bbg reform. be hopeful to work with you and the folks that have worked this book of business as we move forward. thank you very much, mr. chairman. >> thank you. i think the ranking member has a few more questions. >> great. thank you. mr. linick, i just want to pick up where i left off. we were talking about the management of contracts, and you know, maybe some i.t. contracts. you were talking about in some instances instances, doesn't seem to be enough management personnel. do you reach a conclusion about that? is there any degree to which that is because of the sequester? is it because, you know, choices have been made internally not to hire -- you know to hire more of one staff and less contract

acquisition folks? what's your conclusion about that? >> you know, i think it's a matter of -- i mean we don't have any work to support an opinion one way or the other whether they're having problems hiring folks. from the work we've done, i would say it's really a cultural issue, because contracts and grants have skyrocketed in the department over the last five, ten years, and the department i think is having problems keeping up with it and they're trying to do a better job and there have been improvements and they've accepted many of our recommendations in this area. so i think it's an issue of priorities and where they want to put resources. i think it's a cultural issue. contract and grant management is not like diplomacy, so. >> yeah, that's not why anybody decides, i want to go to the state department. >> right. >> right. i had the same issue as governor of my department of

transportation. they used to do a lot of projects and over time migrated to managing a lot of projects but they didn't necessarily migrate their skill set from project engineers to contract managers, so there was a common mismatch. maybe there's some of that going on. on your new mission, you talked about the use of management alerts and these management assessment reports that you do. has that been well received as you've been doing that within department of state? are folks responsive and respond positively to the alerts and reports that you give them? >> i think they've responded very positively. the majority of our recommendations in our management alerts have been accepted and the department's been working on them. and the purpose of them is really two-fold. one is to stop the bleeding. you know, if we're in the middle of an audit we don't want to wait until the end of the audit to tell the department hey, you've got a problem because somebody is cheating you so let's try to stop the bleeding before it happens. and then the second thing we've been trying to do is to the

extent that we find issues and recommendations unimplemented over the years the point of the management alerts is to try to repackage it and aim it at leadership, a different set of leadership, maybe a higher set of leaders, and then also repackage the recommendations so they can be more broadly applied across the department. so, for example, on the contract management, we've asked the department to sample do a sampling of their contract files to make sure the files are in order across the board, to consider putting more resources into it to consider, to look at sort of how a work plan for personnel can be developed so they have enough grant officers and contracting officers. so, it has been well received. and in fact, the appropriations committee in their joint explanatory statement picked up on our recommendations and asked the department to respond to those recommendations, which they have. so, that really helped us out,

having sort of congress's sort of endorsement behind the recommendations and support for complying with them. >> you did not flag this in your oral testimony in the new challenge category but as i read your written testimony i would call a new challenge because it was handed to you in 2014 along with dod and what's the other agency? u.s. aid. >> so talk a little bit about the work that you guys are doing together to get a handle on the way we manage. >> so we have three that have developed in the last four month. we have operated united assistance for ebola and of course operation resolve, which is isil. we have been on the first one, excuse me, the operation resolve, we have been coordinating intensely for many months, and we have accomplished a lot. we became official in december.

the inspector general was appointed, and since then we have been coordinated very closely. we have a joint strategic plan that we published march 31st which addresses how we're coordinating together. we are in the process of putting together a quarterly report which is going to be published some time at the end of april and the way we set it up is operation resolve outlined nine lines of effort in the initiative to address isil, one being governance, another count r messaging and there are others. and the way we split up our duties is to sort of -- state department is responsibility for some of the lines of effort, that would be within any wheel house. some of those lines of effort obtain to d.o.d., then they would do the audits and those. then we do them together. so we are jointly working on

strategy. we are jointly working on program analysis and development, and we are jointly working on publishing the reports. we meet regularly. i'm going to be going on a trip to jordan and turkey to oversee how the state department is addressing isil in those two areas. so it's been a robust, but difficult because we're taking it out of base. we don't have -- we don't have special resources for those. >> we may give d.o.d. oco but we haven't give you an oig oco, have we? let we switch to challenges. the chair talked about the issue, but i want to focus on too, the issue about not being given the same ability as other ig offices to investigate wrongdoing. i think that's an interesting one, and i know you're seeking assistance from us as we do the reauthorization. >> as i looked at a footnote in your testimony incidents or

allegations that can serve as grounds for disciplinary action or criminal prosecution will immediately be referred to the oig or the bureau of diplomatic security or comparable offices and exceptional circumstances the undersecretary for management for state may designate an individual. so there's sort of a requirement that if there's wrongdoing that fits in the category, either or potentially somebody else will be notified. what would the norm be like in another agency in your previous work as an inspector general? is it dual reporting requirement? you know, report it to the diplomat and the oig? how would it normally -- kind of in a more normal way be structured? >> well in those agencies that have a law enforcement component like ds. and dod with law enforcement components, dhs and so forth, their law enforcement components are required to notify them about allegations of serious or criminal misconduct. >> are required to notify the ig's office? >> correct. >> either by statute, or by

regulation. and then the ig is -- has the discretion to decide whether it wants to take the cases or ship them back. and that's the norm. and the reason that is because there are certain cases that may not be appropriately investigated by the host agency. so -- >> and so your request of us would be in in a reauthorization that retry to structure that reporting language to the ig somewhat similar to the way d.o.d. would have it. >> exactly. where we're asking for what the other igs have in terms of legislation, and we would ask that if p that's -- that you track that legislation, that would be what we would like. >> mr. chair i have two more lines of questioning. can i go ahead? another change that you asked for, or actually, i'm not sure that you had this in your written testimony, but i want to make sure we understand.

the congressional budget justification includes a request to change out personnel authorities can be exercised to expedite reemployment -- to support oversite of the oco operation. could you explain the rational for that request so we understand why you're requesting that. we want to be helpful if we can. >> so we have difficulties in our shop of hiring the right people with the right skills. to meet the demands of our mission. we have a unique mission that we have the inspection requirement. we need people to know how embassies run and securities. we have the three ocos. and we also have unanticipated special projects. like the accountability review board and numerous other projects that we have teams of people working on.

so we're seeking more flexible hiring authorities generally. in terms of reemploying, annuitants, we're only able to hire part time. many are doing inspections, so they can only work half a year. which creates tremendous lack of continuity. this enwe have to hire more of this em to get the job done. we would like to hire full-time. similarly, special general for iraq reconstruction we have a special time hiring the folks. they have the skill sets, but they don't have competitive status. so we're looking for opportunities to grab them as well. well. >> that will be helpful to us as we tackle reauthorization. and finally the impact of your work. i found this kind of interesting. first paragraph you talk about the financial savings that

you've cheafed by imply menation of reports. our recommendations to improve the safety of people and facilities, to ensure that employees conduct themselves appropriately and our work to strengthen the integrity of the programs, operations and resources at the foundation of the department's ability to help ensure security. when i read that, i was kind of interested because when i was mayor of richmond we had an author. and the auditor kind of looked at just the numbers. i guess the difference between the oig and the auditor is the oig is looking at the numbers, but also looking at the broader mission. as i kind of interpret that testimony, we're going to look at the numbers and five savings. but at the end of the day, there is a broader mission and first is protecting security of the

personnel, and making sure folks don't do things wrong without consequence, and also promoting national security and that's really what determines the success of an oig's office and what the priorities are. you want to make sure the priorities are in the right order. is that a fair read of your testimony? >> and this is to protect department personnel. they are most important asset in the department. they are really heros. the folks who are at these dangerous posts. senator purdue said earlier that they do -- work. and we do need to protect them. and it's not just about the numbers. and we different from a lot of inspector generals in that we have the security mission, which makes the job so gratifying and great. and since benghazi you've had to evacuate in calendar year

2014 the embassy in libya. and in calendar year 2014, have had to evacuate our embassy in yemen. these are not minor manners. when the the u.s. has to evacuate an embassy because of security conditions, like this is a big, big deal. and so that demonstrates as much as we might wish the benghazi incident, we're just complete light lightning strike not likely to secure again. we have to think they're going to be very important to all of us. correct? >> yes, sir. >> thank you, mr. chair. no other questions. >> very good questions. great answers. mr. linick, i just have one quick question here. and we can wrap this up. but i want to talk about your relationship to the line management, if you will, of the state department. one of the calls is you have security. you're looking at misconduct and

the effectiveness of the state department itself because that affects all of the above. how would you rate the relationship of the ig the state department, the state department leadership? are you getting what you need? you mentioned resources twice. talk to us just a little bit about -- you said i.t. i dependence. you also talks about getting access to investigations to help you do a better job. i'm looking at really in this line of questioning, what have you found operationally inside a state department that we need to be aware of as we look at this reauthorization. >> well, in terms of the relationship with the department, i mean, i have a very good working relationship with the deputy secretary, and i meet with the secretary periodically as well. i just met with him last friday. and they are open to oversight. they recognize it's important, and they recognize the unique role of the i.g. so they've been responsive to resource investment in both