Alfredo Gomez MPP 1991

In his job as senior analyst on the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO), Natural Resources and Environment team, Alfredo Gomez (MPP’91) has studied how the United States implemented the property protection provisions of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848 with Mexico, assessed the eco-system restoration effort of the South Florida Everglades, developed recommendations to ensure that federal lands are properly restored after oil production in Alaska ceases, and determined the extent to which Native American villages are threatened by flooding and erosion and the cost to protect or relocate the villages from these events.

As an independent, nonpartisan agency that exists to support the Congress in meeting its constitutional responsibilities, the GAO and Gomez work to improve government. “That’s always our goal,” he says.

“I always tell new people that working at the GAO is like writing a master’s thesis. You’re presented with a problem or question,” he says, and “asked to design an approach or methodology to pursue, to survey people or collect data, analyze the data, and write a cogent report.”

The process, however, is not always straight-forward. Sometimes, as in the case of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo project, gathering the necessary information requires more than simple data collection. Gomez and his team were asked by Congress to determine how the United States had implemented property protections as outlined in a treaty signed after the Mexican-American war. The original land grants dated back over 150 years to Mexico and Spain. “It was a unique job,” he says. “It was difficult to find people who knew anything about it. The only experts were historians or academicians who focused on land grant issues. So we sort of became experts on the issue.”

Gomez’s training at the Harris School has proved valuable in all of his projects. While the technical background helps, he says, “the GAO looks for good analytical skills in people who are quantitatively trained.”

Having these analytical skills, for example, was essential in a project on the South Florida Ecosystem Restoration Initiative, a $15 billion project that will take as long as 50 years to complete. Because a key component of the restoration initiative is acquiring land for storing water, building water quality treatment areas, and restoring habitats, Gomez was required to determine what the Department of the Interior had done to ensure that it had maximized the acreage acquired with $200 million in grants. To accomplish this Gomez reviewed applicable laws, regulations, and agreements, and the criteria for allocating grant funds. It also required analyzing data on hundreds of parcels acquired to determine how the grant funds were expended, and how the federal and state governments shared the costs.

“A lot of our work requires a lot of conceptual thinking, and I think the approach at the Harris School of interdisciplinary coursework coupled with the quantitative prepares you for that.”

Being a good and accurate writer is also important, he says. “We have to cite every single sentence in every report—either to a document, an analysis, or something. We can’t make mistakes. When your client is the Congress and the American people, you have to be accurate—and we are.”

For more information on the U.S. General Accounting Office, its roles and responsibilities, or to read any of its reports, visit www.gao.gov.