The U.S. Bureau of Prisons is falling behind on the plan to evaluate its drug treatment programs and is missing key logistical elements for a medication-assisted treatment initiative, a federal auditing office has found.

The report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office stemmed from a request that a bipartisan group of senators made in 2018 to evaluate drug treatment in federal prisons.

“As of April 2018, almost half of the federal prison population was incarcerated on a drug-related offense,” read the letter. The percentage at the end of May 2020 remained virtually unchanged, at 45.9% of the more than 155,000 prisoners.

U.S. Sens. Michael Bennet and Cory Gardner were among the senators who asked the GAO to report on how accessible drug treatment services were to those eligible, and whether the bureau tracked the success of the programming.

“Any individual who needs or wants treatment should have access to it,” said Bennet, echoing a similar sentiment from Gardner. “This GAO report is a good first step toward ensuring incarcerated Americans battling addiction receive the support they need.”

The bureau was supposed to complete evaluations of its various treatment programs beginning in fiscal year 2019 and continuing until 2024. However, “BOP officials told us in November 2019 that they would not be able to complete the evaluations of drug education and treatment programs by the time frames listed in the plan because of staffing resource constraints,” the GAO reported.

By failing to complete timely evaluations, the report concluded, the bureau “risks continuing or implementing programs that may not be effective.”

In addition, the bureau’s expansion of a medication-assisted treatment program for those addicted to opioids suffers from a lack of documentation about the number of new personnel the bureau would need, as well as plans for recruiting and training more than 100 incoming employees.

Advocating for a strategy to manage the entire portfolio of treatment programs, the GAO indicated that “a higher-level plan will help to ensure that BOP leadership has the information it needs to manage the agency’s portfolio of programs, particularly given the substantial financial investment in the MAT program.”