FY 2025 U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board Management Challenges

We identified four top management challenges for the CSB for fiscal year 2025:

1. Operating effectively without a full board
   The CSB’s governing board continues to operate at 60 percent capacity, with only three confirmed members. The Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 established that CSB’s board shall consist of five board members, including a chairperson, who are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. That board is responsible for major budgeting decisions, strategic planning and direction, general oversight of the CSB, and approval of investigation reports and studies. A full board ensures that the CSB can function effectively in the event of the loss of one or more board members.
2. Minimizing mission-critical staff vacancies and attrition rates
   Vacancies and attrition rates remain a concern. As of early June 2024, the CSB’s staffing level was 21 percent short of its authorized 52 full-time equivalents for fiscal year 2024. Despite some improvements, we remain concerned that staffing problems affect the CSB’s ability to carry out day-to-day operations in a timely manner, including contracting, administrative support, deployment to new incidents, completion of investigations, and issuance of reports.
3. Improving cybersecurity
   During fiscal year 2024, the CSB began implementing improvements to its information security processes and procedures we recommended in accordance with the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2014. The CSB improved its information security program maturity level to a Level 2, Defined.
4. Promoting ethical conduct
   In July 2023, the U.S. Office of Government Ethics issued a report with ten recommendations for improving the CSB’s ethics program. The OGE has closed two of the recommendations but eight are still open. CSB management anticipates all the remaining recommendations will be closed during fiscal year 2025.
    

Report Materials

• The CSB’s Fiscal Year 2025 Top Management Challenges (pdf) (256.34 KB)