Chapter 10 Appendix II: Scope and Methodology
United States Government Accountability Office
To determine the extent to which the federal government has assessed the sufficiency of its veterinarian workforce for routine activities, we interviewed officials and collected documents from the American Veterinary Medical Association, the National Association of Federal Veterinarians (NAFV), and the Association of American Veterinary Medical Colleges to identify general concerns about the federal veterinarian workforce.
NAFV also provided a review it had conducted in 1996 that identified federal departments and agencies that employ veterinarians. We expanded this list of departments and component agencies based on referrals and experience from our past reports, resulting in a list of 24 component agencies and other federal entities. We then surveyed these 24 entities to obtain information on the federal veterinarian workforce—including the number of veterinarians employed, their grade level, salaries, roles and responsibilities, number of vacancies, and sufficiency of the workforce. We conducted this self-administered electronic survey in October 2007 and then requested an update of this survey information in July 2008. We achieved a 100 percent response rate both times. However, one entity was unable to provide some of the specific salary information we requested, and we noted this in our report.Because this was not a sample survey, but rather a survey of the universe of respondents, it has no sampling errors. However, the practical difficulties of conducting any survey may introduce errors, commonly referred to as nonsampling errors. For example, respondents may have difficulty interpreting a particular question, the sources of information available to respondents may introduce errors or variability, and analysts may introduce errors when entering data into a database or analyzing these data.
We took steps in developing the questionnaire, collecting the data, and analyzing them to minimize such nonsampling error. For example, we pretested the survey to ensure that the questions were relevant, clearly stated, and easy to understand.To obtain salary information for Department of Agriculture (USDA) agencies over the past 5 years, we used data from the Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) Central Personnel Data File. We did not independently verify these data for the years we reviewed; however, in a 1998 report, we found that governmentwide data from this file for the key variables in this study (agency, birth date, service computation date, occupation, and retirement plan) were 99 percent accurate or better.1 Therefore, we feel these data were sufficiently reliable for the purposes of this review.
On the basis of information we received in our survey of these component agencies and other entities, we then analyzed the workforce assessment efforts of USDA, the Department of Defense (DOD), and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). We selected these departments because they employ the majority of federal veterinarians (96 percent) identified in our survey. Within these three departments, we further focused our review on five component agencies—the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), FSIS, Army, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—to determine the extent to which they assessed the sufficiency of their veterinarian workforce. We also selected the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) for further review because it is USDA’s chief scientific research agency and conducts research to solve agricultural problems of high national priority. We conducted our assessment by reviewing department and agency documents, such as workforce plans, human capital management reports, workforce models, and gap assessments. We then compared workforce assessment efforts of the three departments and five component agencies with GAO workforce planning guidance.
We also conducted semistructured interviews with workforce planning and veterinarian program officials. In addition, we interviewed an author of the report FDA Science and Mission at Risk regarding the report’s findings and their relation to FDA veterinarian skill gaps. Further, we visited one poultry and two beef slaughter plants of varying sizes to observe conditions and interview veterinarians and other FSIS officials. We also interviewed FSIS officials working at the slaughter plant that was the subject of the nation’s largest beef recall. We selected these plants on the basis of proximity to the sites of the four recent zoonotic disease outbreaks we reviewed, and recommendations from FSIS officials. Moreover, other veterinarians contacted us to relay concerns about the sufficiency of the FSIS veterinarian workforce. We interviewed officials from the OPM to determine the agency's role in workforce planning for federal veterinarians and to identify recruitment and retention authorities available to agencies and departments. Finally, we interviewed experts from the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, the National Association of State Public Health Veterinarians, the American College of Veterinary Pathologists, the American Association of Wildlife Veterinarians, the American Association of Veterinary Laboratory Diagnosticians, and the National Academy of Sciences to identify workforce needs for veterinary specialties including public health, wildlife veterinarians, veterinary laboratory diagnostics, and veterinary pathology.To determine the extent to which the federal government has identified the veterinarian workforce needed during a catastrophic event, we analyzed workforce planning efforts for two potential large-scale national incidents that the White House Homeland Security Council deemed critical for planning purposes: a pandemic and a foot-and-mouth disease outbreak. For the first, we compared pandemic plans from APHIS, FSIS, ARS, Army, and FDA to guidance the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) Federal Emergency Management Agency provided to departments and agencies for identifying special considerations for maintaining essential functions and services under such conditions.2’3 These agencies were selected for the reasons described above.
We interviewed agency officials to discuss identified gaps and determine the extent to which the plans were being updated and tested. Furthermore, we interviewed HHS officials to understand their review of state pandemic plans, which are under development to ensure continuity of the food supply system and the ability to respond to agriculture emergencies. For the second, we reviewed veterinarian workforce outcomes from DHS's nationwide effort to assess the nation's preparedness for multiple, intentional introductions of foot-and-mouth disease. In addition to interviewing the DHS official responsible for coordinating the animal health emergency capability, we also interviewed state officials who have conducted large-scale exercises simulating a response to foot-and-mouth disease, as well as USDA officials with responsibility for such an event, to determine the feasibility of the response depicted in the scenario. Because vaccine use was suggested as an alternative strategy to the slaughter of animals infected with foot-and-mouth disease, we also interviewed USDA's Chief Veterinary Officer, and DHS and USDA officials at Plum Island Animal Disease Center to determine the status of foot-and-mouth disease vaccine development and the feasibility, as well as practicality, of their use. Finally, at the recommendation of DHS, we interviewed the Department of Energy official responsible for overseeing the development of a decision support system that models various foot-and-mouth disease outbreak scenarios in order to estimate the number and type of workforce needed for responding to outbreaks. The Department of Energy is performing this work under contract for DHS. We also interviewed USDA, DHS, and Department of the Interior (Interior) officials to determine the extent to which agencies are including the possible spread of foot-and-mouth disease in wildlife in their planning efforts.To determine the extent to which federal and state agencies encountered veterinarian workforce challenges during four recent zoonotic outbreaks, we conducted semistructured interviews with 17 federal and state agencies involved in these outbreaks.
We relied on federal and state officials to identify those agencies that played an important role in outbreak response. Based on this information, we then interviewed officials from USDA, HHS, Interior, state public health departments, state agriculture and wildlife agencies, state diagnostic laboratories, and one county public health agency. We also interviewed other individuals involved in the outbreaks, including researchers from Northwestern University, the University of California at Davis, and Western University of Health Sciences. We selected the four outbreaks in our review—bovine tuberculosis in Michigan, exotic Newcastle disease in California, monkeypox in Wisconsin, and West Nile virus in Colorado— because these outbreaks were most frequently recommended by federal officials as examples of recent zoonotic diseases; are ongoing or have occurred since 2001; and have affected various types of animals, including livestock, wildlife, pets, and exotic animals. In addition, we chose these four outbreaks for review because of the unique nature of the outbreaks in these states. Specifically, we selected Michigan as the state for the bovine tuberculosis review because the ongoing outbreak is the longest outbreak of this disease in the United States in recent history. We chose California because it experienced the greatest number of animal infections for the exotic Newcastle disease outbreak. We selected Wisconsin because it experienced the most human monkeypox infections. We selected Colorado for West Nile virus because the number of human infections in Colorado in 2003 was the highest for a single state. In addition to the interviews, we also analyzed federal, state, and county documents, such as after action reports, in order to (1) understand the extent to which agencies formally assessed the management of their veterinarian workforces during these outbreaks and (2) identify any workforce-related challenges and steps agencies took to address these challenges.End Notes
1 GAO, OPM's Central Personnel Data File: Data Appear Sufficiently Reliable to Meet Most
Customer Needs, GAO/GGD-98-199 (Washington, D.C.: Sept. 30, 1998).
2 To learn more about federal guidance for pandemic planning, see
http://www.pandemicflu.gov/plan/federal/index.html.
3 GAO has a separate review under way that is looking at federal agency plans for protecting the
workforce while maintaining their essential functions during a pandemic.