In February 2017, components of California’s Oroville Dam failed, leading to the evacuation of nearly 200,000 nearby residents. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is the federal regulator of the Oroville Dam, as well as over 2,500 other dams associated with nonfederal hydropower projects nationwide, and in the wake of the incident the U.S. Government Accounability Office (GAO) was asked to review FERC’s approach to overseeing dam safety. GAO found that while FERC staff generally followed established guidance in collected safety information during dam inspections, FERC lacked standard procedures for recording safety deficiencies. As a result, FERC staff use multiple systems to record inspections, creating information that cannot be easily analyzed to help facilitate risk assessments and remediation prioritization. To address these issues, GAO recommends FERC develop standard procedures for recording information collected as part of its inspections and use inspection information to assess safety risks across its portfolio of dams.