[Senate Report 106-347]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
106th Congress Report
2d Session SENATE 106-347
_______________________________________________________________________
SPECIAL REPORT
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONS
UNITED STATES SENATE
ON THE
GOVERNMENT PERFORMANCE AND RESULTS ACT OF 1993
July 18, 2000--Ordered to be printed
COMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONS
TED STEVENS, Alaska, Chairman
THAD COCHRAN, Mississippi ROBERT C. BYRD, West Virginia
ARLEN SPECTER, Pennsylvania DANIEL K. INOUYE, Hawaii
PETE V. DOMENICI, New Mexico ERNEST F. HOLLINGS, South Carolina
CHRISTOPHER S. BOND, Missouri PATRICK J. LEAHY, Vermont
SLADE GORTON, Washington FRANK R. LAUTENBERG, New Jersey
MITCH McCONNELL, Kentucky TOM HARKIN, Iowa
CONRAD BURNS, Montana BARBARA A. MIKULSKI, Maryland
RICHARD C. SHELBY, Alabama HARRY REID, Nevada
JUDD GREGG, New Hampshire HERB KOHL, Wisconsin
ROBERT F. BENNETT, Utah PATTY MURRAY, Washington
BEN NIGHTHORSE CAMPBELL, Colorado BYRON L. DORGAN, North Dakota
LARRY CRAIG, Idaho DIANNE FEINSTEIN, California
KAY BAILEY HUTCHISON, Texas RICHARD J. DURBIN, Illinois
JON KYL, Arizona
Steven J. Cortese, Staff Director
Lisa Sutherland, Deputy Staff Director
James H. English, Minority Staff Director
C O N T E N T S
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Page
I. Introduction.................................................. 1
Legislative History.......................................... 1
Implementation............................................... 3
II. Statement of Purpose......................................... 7
III. Subcommittee Analysis....................................... 8
Subcommittee on Agriculture, Rural Development and Related
Agencies................................................... 8
Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, State, the Judiciary and
Related Agencies........................................... 17
Subcommittee on Defense...................................... 23
Subcommittee on Military Construction........................ 33
Subcommittee on District of Columbia......................... 34
Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development................. 39
Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, Export Financing, and
Related Agencies........................................... 42
Subcommittee on Interior and Related Agencies................ 46
Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and
Education, and Related Agencies............................ 52
Subcommittee on Transportation............................... 63
Subcommittee on Treasury and General Government.............. 67
Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs, Housing and Urban
Development and Independent Agencies....................... 82
IV. Program Duplication and Overlap.............................. 90
V. Observations and Conclusion................................... 95
I. INTRODUCTION
legislative history of the government performance and results act
The Government Performance and Results Act of 1993,
commonly referred to as ``GPRA'' or the ``Results Act,'' was
enacted with the broad, bipartisan support of both Congress and
the Executive Branch. The Results Act originated from Senate
Bill No. 20, introduced by Senator Roth and co-sponsored by
several other Senators during the 103rd Congress. The Senate
Governmental Affairs Committee favorably reported the bill by
voice vote on June 16, 1993 (S. Rept. No. 103-58). Both the
Senate and House of Representatives passed the bill by
unanimous consent, and it was signed into law by the President
on August 3, 1993 (Public Law 103-62).
The Act is designed to respond to widespread concern that
the Federal Government has not been held accountable for
delivering the level and quality of results anticipated by the
American people. The Governmental Affairs Committee report
which accompanies S. 20 evidences this concern as follows:
``a recent public opinion poll * * * shows that
Americans, on average, believe that as much as 48 cents
out of every Federal tax dollar is wasted. In other
words, the public believes that it is not getting the
level and quality of government service for which it is
paying.'' \1\
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\1\ S. Rept. No. 103-58 at p. 2.
Thus, the first Congressional statement of purpose of the
Act was ``to improve the confidence of the American people in
the capability of the Federal Government, by systematically
holding Federal agencies accountable for achieving program
results.'' \2\
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\2\ Section 2(b)(1) of Pub. L. No. 103-62, 107 Stat. 285.
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The three cornerstones of the Results Act are strategic
plans, annual performance plans, and annual performance
reports:
--Strategic plans.--Agencies, in consultation with Congress,
are required to develop 5-year strategic plans that
must contain: (1) a comprehensive mission statement for
the agency and (2) long term results-oriented goals
covering each of its major functions. The initial
agency strategic plans were submitted to the Office of
Management and Budget [OMB] and Congress in September
1997.\3\ Strategic plans must be updated at least every
3 years. The first updates are due in September
2000.\4\
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\3\ While the Results Act was enacted in August 1993, it provided a
long lead time for agencies to prepare for its implementation. For
example, during the period between August 1993 and submission of the
first round of strategic plans in September 1997, agencies conducted
performance measurement pilot programs to test the Act's concepts.
Agencies also consulted with Congress on their draft strategic plans
during the Spring and Summer of 1997.
\4\ 5 U.S.C. 306.
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--Annual performance plans.--Agencies are required to prepare
annual performance plans that: (1) establish
performance goals for the applicable fiscal year, which
generally must be expressed in an objective,
quantifiable, and measurable form; (2) briefly describe
the means and strategies needed to meet the goals; and
(3) describe the means used to verify and validate
performance. In addition to the agency plans, OMB
submits an annual government-wide performance plan as
part of the President's budget. The first round of
agency performance plans and the first government-wide
performance plan were submitted in February 1998 and
apply to fiscal year 1999.\5\
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\5\ 31 U.S.C. 1115.
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--Annual performance reports.--Agencies are required to
prepare annual performance reports that review the
agency's success in achieving its performance goals for
the applicable fiscal year and explain and describe
where performance goals have not been met. The first
round of annual performance reports is due by March 31,
2000, and will cover the agency performance goals for
fiscal year 1999.\6\
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\6\ 31 U.S.C. 1116.
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Collectively, the strategic and performance plans and the
performance reports establish a comprehensive system of
accountability through which agencies articulate what they are
trying to accomplish, how they will accomplish it, and how
Congress and the public will know whether they are succeeding.
The emphasis of the Results Act is on shifting performance
measures from process (e.g., number of regulations issued) to
results (e.g., safer workplaces). Without results measures, it
is impossible to determine which programs are working and which
are not.
One fundamental purpose of the Results Act is to link
Federal funding decisions to program performance. The
Appropriations Committee has a key role and responsibility to
help ensure that this purpose of the Act is fulfilled.
Accordingly, the Committee intends to conduct active oversight
of the implementation of the Results Act. In his opening
statement at a June 24, 1997 joint hearing on implementation of
the Results Act before the Senate Appropriations and
Governmental Affairs Committees, Senator Ted Stevens, Chairman
of the Senate Appropriations Committee, emphasized the
potential that the Results Act holds and the determination of
Appropriations Committee Members to see it realized:
``The American public has demanded an end to
inefficient and wasteful spending by the Federal
government. The American public has demanded a balanced
budget. Our responsibility on the Appropriations
Committee is to provide adequate funding for those
programs that are a proper responsibility of the
Federal government. With the Results Act, we can ask
other important questions about Federal programs, such
as what will the program accomplish, what will it cost
to accomplish it, how will the results be achieved, and
how will the agency monitor the program's
effectiveness. If properly implemented, the Results Act
can assist Congress in identifying and eliminating
duplicate or ineffective programs. Congress intends to
monitor compliance with the Results Act every step of
the way to ensure that agencies are providing us with
the information necessary to do our job of safeguarding
the taxpayers' money.''
This report, which evaluates agency performance plans for
fiscal year 2000, is issued in furtherance of the Committee's
commitment to monitor agency compliance with the Results Act.
implementation
Although the Results Act was enacted in August 1993, its
first major implementation step, submission of the initial
round of strategic plans, did not occur until September 1997.
The Act provided this long lead time to give agencies the
opportunity to prepare for the many implementation challenges.
Unfortunately, few agencies took advantage of the opportunity.
A GAO report issued on the eve of the strategic plan
submissions found that:
``many agencies did not appear to be well positioned
to provide in 1997 a results-oriented answer to the
fundamental Results Act question: What are we
accomplishing?'' \7\
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\7\ The Government Performance and Results Act: 1997 Governmentwide
Implementation Will Be Uneven, GAO/GGD-97-109 (June 1997), at p. 5.
Draft strategic plans.--This assessment was confirmed when
agencies submitted their draft strategic plans for
Congressional consultations, in accordance with the Results
Act.\8\ With GAO's assistance, cross-jurisdictional, bipartisan
Congressional teams set up to facilitate consultations reviewed
the draft plans. The results were very disappointing. Most of
the plans reviewed did not even contain the minimal six
elements expressly required by the law.
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\8\ The Act specifically requires agencies to consult with
Congress, as well as other agency stakeholders, when developing their
strategic plans. 5 U.S.C. 306(d).
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The seeming inattention to the draft plans was particularly
surprising since Congress had signaled the high priority it
attached to them. Specifically, the leaders of both Houses of
Congress stressed the importance of the strategic plans and
laid out detailed expectations for them in a letter to the
Director of OMB dated February 25, 1997. With respect to agency
performance plans, the letter emphasized that, in order to be
useful to Congress, the plans should be timely and ``should
provide a complete and clear picture of what an agency intends
to accomplish with a given level of resources.''
Final strategic plans.--The final strategic plans submitted
in September 1997 produced both good and bad news. The good
news was that most agencies responded to the Congressional
critiques and made significant improvements in their drafts.
All of the final plans reviewed by GAO and the Congressional
teams complied with the minimal legal requirements of the
Results Act.
The bad news was that the final plans remained, in the
words of GAO, ``very much a work in progress.'' \9\
Furthermore, because of the extreme deficiencies of the draft
plans, the Congressional consultation process with agencies had
been diverted from the substantive policy dialog that the Act
envisioned to a major effort simply to ensure that the plans
complied with the technical requirements of the law.
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\9\ Managing For Results: Agencies' Annual Performance Plans Can
Help Address Strategic Planning Challenges, GAO/GGD-98-44 (January
1998), at p. 3.
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Fiscal year 1999 performance plans.--The first round of
performance plans, which covered fiscal year 1999, were
submitted in February 1998 as scheduled. However, GAO and
Congressional evaluations of those performance plans found they
tended to repeat, instead of rectify, the shortcomings of the
strategic plans. A June 9, 1998 letter from Congressional
leaders to the Director of OMB listed the following major
recurring problem areas in the plans:
--The strategic plans did not lay a good foundation for the
performance plans.
--The depth and breadth of data problems facing most agencies
became even more pronounced in the performance plans.
--Performance goals and measures were not as results-oriented
as they should have been; some goals were not even
objective, quantifiable, or measurable.
--The plans failed to link performance goals and measures to
individual programs and day-to-day agency activities.
--The performance plans showed little evidence of
coordinating cross-cutting programs and activities.
--Few agency performance plans dealt effectively with major
management problems.
A subsequent GAO report on its evaluations of the fiscal
year 1999 performance plans reiterated the same concerns:
``Most of the plans that we reviewed contained major
weaknesses that undermined their usefulness in that
they (1) did not consistently provide clear pictures of
agencies' intended performance, (2) generally did not
relate strategies and resources to performance, and (3)
provided limited confidence that agencies' performance
data will be sufficiently credible.'' \10\
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\10\ Managing for Results: An Agenda to Improve the Usefulness of
Agencies' Annual Performance Plans, GAO/GGD-AIMD-98-228 (July 1998), at
p. 3.
Fiscal year 2000 performance plans.--In February 1999,
Federal agencies submitted their second round of annual
performance plans, which cover fiscal year 2000. GAO once again
reviewed the performance plans for the 24 Cabinet departments
and major independent agencies and reported its findings.\11\
GAO found that, on the whole, the fiscal year 2000 plans showed
``moderate improvements'' over the fiscal year 1999 plans and
contained better information and perspective. However,
according to GAO, ``key weaknesses'' remain and important
opportunities exist to improve future plans. Specifically, GAO
listed the following key weaknesses in the plans:
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\11\ Managing for Results: Opportunities for Continued Improvements
in Agencies' Performance Plans, GAO/GGD/AIMD-99-215 (July 1999).
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--Attention to mission-critical management challenges and
program risks is not consistent.
--Coordination of crosscutting program areas needs additional
effort.
--Presentations of how agencies' human capital and management
resources and strategies will be used to achieve
results are insufficient.
--Confidence that performance data will be credible is
limited.
It is a positive sign that most agencies are improving
their plans and moving in the direction of becoming more
performance-based. However, the key weaknesses in most of this
year's plans are largely the same ones as last year--lack of
credible performance data, lack of specific commitments to
solve major management problems, and failure to coordinate
overlapping programs.
With respect to data reliability, GAO found that 20 of the
24 major agencies' fiscal year 2000 plans provided little
confidence that they could produce credible performance data.
Even for the other four agencies, GAO expressed less than full
confidence in the credibility of their performance data. The
GAO report stresses the seriousness of this problem:
``The inattention to ensuring that performance data
will be sufficiently timely, complete, accurate,
useful, and consistent is an important weakness in the
performance plans. Ultimately, performance plans will
not be useful to congressional decision makers unless
and until this key weakness is resolved.''\12\
(emphasis added)
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\12\ Id. at p. 7 (Emphasis supplied.)
The same data problems associated with the performance
plans threaten to undermine the usefulness of the upcoming
Results Act performance reports. Therefore, it is essential
that these problems be remedied if the Results Act is to
accomplish its fundamental purpose of demonstrating to the
American people what the Federal government is accomplishing in
a concrete and credible way.
With respect to major management problems, GAO found that
agency fiscal year 2000 plans adopted specific and measurable
performance goals to address only about 40 percent of the core
management problems in their fiscal year 2000 performance
plans. Core management problems seriously undermine the Federal
government's performance and leave it vulnerable to billions of
dollars in waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement. The GAO
report noted that these problems ``must be addressed as part of
any serious effort to fundamentally improve the performance of
Federal agencies.'' \13\ The key to addressing them is for
agencies to adopt specific performance commitments for which
they can be held accountable under the Results Act. There is
much room for improvement here.
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\13\ Id., p. 13.
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The Federal government is rife with overlapping agencies
and multiple programs directed at the same problems. Congress
has emphasized the need for agencies to develop complementary
performance goals and measures, both to ensure consistency
among overlapping programs and to provide a basis for comparing
performance results. Yet, GAO found that few of the fiscal year
2000 performance plans discussed strategies for coordinating
overlapping programs and establishing complementary performance
goals and measures. The Results Act strategic and performance
planning requirements offer the ideal opportunity to develop
shared performance goals and indicators and provide an
excellent venue for coordinating crosscutting programs.
Need for OMB leadership.--Congress has repeatedly stressed
the need for greater leadership by OMB to strengthen
implementation of the Results Act and enhance the usefulness of
Results Act plans and information. However, leadership by OMB
has not been forthcoming. Indeed, quite the opposite has
occurred. One example of this is OMB's failure to meet its
specific statutory obligations with regard to performance
budgeting pilots. Section 6(c) of the Results Act, codified at
31 U.S.C. 1119, required the Director of OMB to designate not
less than five agencies as pilot projects in performance
budgeting for fiscal years 1998 and 1999. Despite the specific
requirements of the law, OMB informed Congressional leaders in
a letter dated May 20, 1997, that it was ``delaying the start''
of the pilots until 1999 in order to ``allow agencies to
concentrate on the more immediate task of developing their
performance plans.'' OMB did not designate the pilots in 1999
either, and now says they will be designated in fiscal year
2000.
This Committee wishes to reiterate the need for OMB to
provide strong leadership and support to agencies in
implementing the Results Act. The Committee also wishes to
express its specific concern over OMB's failure to meet its
statutory obligations for the performance budgeting pilots. As
discussed previously, linking funding decisions to program
performance is a key purpose of the Results Act. This is also a
very challenging task. The performance budgeting pilots
constitute the important first step for testing different
approaches to this task--and a step that cannot be delayed
further.
II. STATEMENT OF PURPOSE
This special report by the Senate Appropriations Committee
analyzes the impact of the Results Act on the appropriations
process. The report addresses by subcommittee the following :
--An evaluation of agency goals and measures for its key
programs and activities to determine whether the goals
and measures are results-oriented, reasonably
challenging, and subject to reliable measurement;
--An examination of cross-cutting programs and activities and
duplicative programs and activities;
--An analysis of agency information sources and agency data
reliability;
--An examination of the status of high risk problems within
certain agencies;
--A review of the consultation process between agencies and
the Appropriations Committee staff; and
--An evaluation of the usefulness of the performance plans to
the Committee staff.
The report does not cover every Federal entity covered by
the Results Act. However, it does review those agencies which
are responsible for major Federal programs and activities and,
as a result, have sizable budget requests presented to
Congress.
The production of this report has given Committee staff an
opportunity to better understand the purpose and requirements
of the Results Act. Its production has further served as an
incentive for Committee staff to communicate with agency
personnel on agency compliance with the Results Act's
requirements. And, finally, both Committee members and staff
have engaged in a thoughtful analysis of the impact of the
Results Act on the appropriations process.
III. SUBCOMMITTEE ANALYSIS
SUBCOMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURE, RURAL DEVELOPMENT, AND RELATED AGENCIES
DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE
Agricultural Research Service
The Agricultural Research Service [ARS] has developed an
outcome oriented strategic plan and, in accordance with GPRA
workgroup recommendations, streamlined its more than 1,100
research projects into 23 integrated National Research Programs
in order to more effectively manage the research program. The
principal tool for moving the agency towards a greater focus on
performance management is the full development and
implementation of these National Programs.
This organization of National Programs represents a
complete change in the way ARS manages its research program. In
the ARS Annual Performance Plan covering fiscal years 1999 and
2000, the Agency specifically identifies performance measures
that will be met if Congress concurs with the budget request.
The 23 new National Programs are the principal components
of the Agency's approach to programmatic accountability. The
National Programs support the ARS Strategic Plan and are
focused on specific short and long term goals. Performance
information is the basis of the Annual Performance Report. The
National Programs unit also plans to comprehensively review its
performance information data gathering efforts before it begins
to collect information on fiscal year 1999 performance.
The goals and measures of the ARS are focused on the most
important objectives of the agency. For example, one of the
agency's goals is to ensure an adequate food supply and
improved detection, surveillance, prevention, and educational
programs for the American public's health, safety, and well-
being. Through this goal ARS will work to improve vegetable
oils, decrease dependence on herbicides, improve crop
pollination, and develop a vaccine for bloodborne bacterial
disease or farm raised foodfish. These goals and measures are
results-oriented to help improve the safety and health of
agricultural products. These goals are challenging and can
realistically be met and are subject to reliable measurement.
As far as cross-cutting programs and activities, the ARS
will develop scientifically defensible guidelines and
decisionmaking tools to assist the Natural Resources
Conservation Service [NRCS] in developing nutrient management
plans for phosphorus and animal manure application. Tools will
be provided to establish agronomically and environmentally
sound threshold soil phosphorus levels, determine phosphorus-
based manure application rates, and select effective remedial
strategies to minimize phosphorus loss to surface waters. This
will assist States and national regulatory agencies in meeting
their mandates to revise the nutrient management planning
process of Confirmed Animal Feeding Operations and provide
criteria for managing nutrients in water bodies as requested in
the Clean Water Action Plan. Also, ARS will finalize the
development of methods with NRCS to reduce the transport of
weed seeds, microbes, and pathogens in water flocculants.
The performance goals specified in the Annual Performance
Plans are directly linked to the agency's Strategic Plan in
order to develop a consistent internal movement towards more
outcome-oriented research. ARS has demonstrated its commitment
to programmatic accountability through this internal change as
well as its action in developing an Annual Performance Plan for
fiscal years 1999 and 2000, one year ahead of the statutory
requirement.
After considerable internal studies and discussions with
other Federal research agencies, ARS determined that it could
not effectively display its research accomplishments or the
reliability or credibility of its research through empirical or
numerical metrics as sought by GPRA. These methods were
attempted, but the results did not remotely address the intent
of GPRA. After arriving at this conclusion, ARS requested a
waiver under GPRA in order to use a narrative approach to
demonstrate this information. This request was approved by OMB.
The result was the identification of approximately 150 specific
anticipated accomplishments for each year that, if achieved,
will allow ARS to meet its performance goals.
The creation of National Programs as well as the other
performance goals of ARS will prove useful in strengthening the
interaction between ARS and its customers, partners, and
stockholders. This process of goal setting and achievement will
also be key in demonstrating to the Subcommittee the value of
funding and dedication of the ARS to progress through the
agency's specific request and demonstration of need.
Although ARS is an agency making strides to comply with
GPRA regulations, its performance plan, when evaluated, left
some things to be desired. While its report contained
objective, measurable, and quantifiable goals, it lacked the
means to measure progress in certain areas. The plan lacked
baseline and interim performance data needed to ascertain
progress toward meeting goals. One example of this is the
clarity of the linkage between performance and strategic goals.
In addition to these shortcomings, ARS's performance in the
areas of consultation and interaction with the Subcommittee
have been less than satisfactory.
Farm Service Agency
The goal of the Farm Service Agency's [FSA] is to provide
an economic safety net through farm income support to eligible
producers, cooperatives, and associations to: (1) help improve
the economic stability and viability of the agricultural
sector, and (2) ensure the production of an adequate and
reasonably priced supply of food and fiber. In addition, FSA
works to enhance the economic safety net for farmers and
ranchers and to open, expand, and maintain global market
opportunities for agricultural producers. The goals and
measures are results-oriented because FSA is working to improve
the effectiveness and efficiency of commodity acquisition,
procurement, storage, and distribution activities to support
domestic and international food assistance programs, and to
administer the U.S. Warehouse Act. These goals are reasonably
challenging and can be realistically met.
FSA's performance plan provided a clear picture of the
Agency's intended performance across the agency, including a
means to measure progress towards expected performance. This
agency was also recognized for its crosscutting effort with the
Commodity Credit Corporation to protect communities' water
supplies against chemical contamination; to this end, both FSA
and the Corporation operate hazardous waste management
programs. Although FSA's performance plan briefly discusses
both programs, the plan does not address whether or how
activities under these programs will be coordinated to ensure
that the programs work in concert to achieve their common goal.
In a similar fashion, FSA and the Natural Resources
Conservation Service [NRCS] each administer programs designed
to take environmentally sensitive lands out of production to,
among other things, conserve soil, protect water quality and
provide habitat for wildlife. Once again, while each agency's
performance plan describes these programs, neither of the two
describes the correlation between the two.
The FSA has taken several specific steps to comply with the
Results Act. One of its major steps has been the installation
of the Senior Management and Controls Committee [SMCC]. This
committee provides leadership, commitment, and guidance to the
agency's strategic planning program. The committee also
provides strategic direction for the agency by establishing
strategic goals; overseeing development and implementation of
Agency Strategic and Annual Performance Plans; and
communicating GPRA results to Congress, the Administration,
customers, and other stakeholders.
The Agency also established the Strategic Management and
Corporate Operations Staff within the Office of the
Administrator, which works closely with the SMCC to carry out
the Agency's strategic management initiatives. The FSA
established key contacts in each program and administrative
area that are responsible for developing, implementing, and
monitoring performance goals and measures. In compliance with
GPRA requirements, FSA developed a Strategic Plan for fiscal
years 1997-2002 and Annual Performance Plans for fiscal years
1999 and 2000.
The Farm Loan Program annual performance goals and measures
are reflected in the goals for each State. These goals and
measures were developed to achieve the desired results outlined
in the strategic plan. The State Executive Director for each
State is held responsible for achieving these goals. This is
just one example of FSA practicing performance-based business.
Another example is the complete review of the Agency's
commodity procurement and licensing and examination procedures
being conducted by the Deputy Administrator for Commodity
Operations. This review involves industry and customer
interviews, development and analysis of alternative ways of
conducting these functions, and cost analysis of such
alternatives. This review will result in recommendations to
improve the efficiency and performance of the licensing and
procurement operations, and the review team will learn the
importance of knowing what customers want and being pro-active
in meeting customers' needs.
Additionally, FSA's Administrator has a separate
performance agreement on Equal Employment Opportunity/Civil
Rights [EEO/CR] which includes specific goals and measures by
which the Administrator will be rated. The Agency's Deputy
Administrators' Performance Plan contains a performance element
and standards directly linked to accomplishment of the
Administrator's EEO/CR goals.
Performance information is being used to manage this
agency. Starting in June 1999, program managers were
responsible for monitoring performance data and submitting
quarterly reports to the Strategic Management and Corporate
Operations Staff. Monitoring performance on a quarterly basis
allows the Agency to make adjustments in a timely manner,
helping to ensure achievement of performance goals.
The FSA has become a more performance-oriented agency, as
evidenced by the amount of direct program changes it has made
in both farm and commodity related programs. In addition to
these changes, FSA has gone to great lengths to install
internal systems to achieve these performance goals.
The Annual Performance Plan encompasses all program
activities included in the agency's budget request and reflects
the program activities associated with identified goals. This
linkage enables decision makers to assess the full time
equivalent positions and funding requirements of achieving
annual performance goals. Performance goals were developed for
each FSA budget account. These measures are incorporated in
budget material to indicate expected performance to be achieved
based on available funding. The FSA has no plans to make
changes to this structure in the near future since this direct
linkage is sufficient to analyze performance and meet GPRA
requirements.
FSA was not able to report the balance of its data by the
deadline specified by GPRA for the fiscal year 2000 performance
plan. The areas where data is not specified and a reason for
the lack of data are going to be included in the Annual
Performance Report, accompanied by an explanation supporting
the reason data is unavailable and anticipated time frames to
obtain the data.
During the period that the Subcommittee was making funding
decisions, there was no consultation or interaction with FSA
staff. There was no agency input to help the Subcommittee
understand FSA's reasoning for funding requests or intentions.
The information provided in the performance plan was moderately
useful but had minimal influence on funding decisions.
Food and Drug Administration
The Food and Drug Administration [FDA] has focused on the
most important objectives of its programs by its strategic goal
to reduce the possibility of food-related injuries and improve
the health and well being of consumers by ensuring that
decisions related to approving petitions and notifications are
scientifically justified and benefit the public health. One of
the most important program strategic goals of the FDA is to
reduce human suffering and enhance the quality of public health
by providing quicker access to important, lifesaving drugs, and
to assure the American public of the availability of safe and
effective drugs. The goals and measures are results-oriented
because they seek to improve the safety of foods, human drugs,
and medical devices. The goals and measures are challenging
because of the complexities faced in making available a safe
and effective drug supply. The goal of ensuring timely review
for medical devices can be met, but a backlog of drug approvals
still exists. The goals and measures are subject to reliable
measurement and are also balanced among competing demands. The
FDA and the Food Safety and Inspection Service [FSIS]
demonstrate cross-cutting programs and activities as they both
safeguard the public interest in food safety.
The FDA expects to have reliable data for each performance
goal. Depending on the nature of the goal statement, either
metric, milestone or system improvement, the data will be
presented either numerically or descriptively. Strengths,
weaknesses, or other qualifying statements will provide
additional information about the agency's performance toward
the goal. FDA's Office of Planning and Evaluation produces
guidance documents and training programs and arranges
individual consultations with program managers to promote good
performance planning practices. An important aspect of that
guidance has been information about data reliability,
verification and validation. Since March 2000 will be the first
time that results will be reported, there was a considerable
amount of discussion during calendar year 1999 on strategies to
assure data reliability. FDA acknowledges that by the time they
report on the fiscal year 2000 performance goals in 2001, they
expect to be more proficient at managing and reporting
performance information. The agency did not consult with the
Subcommittee on its performance plan. The FDA's performance
plan is more informative than other performance plans that have
been reviewed. However, much information is presented, and it
is a bit overwhelming.
Food and Nutrition Service
The Food and Nutrition Service [FNS] has a Strategic Plan
which outlines the goals it plans to achieve incrementally by
fiscal year 2002. The agency has also developed the fiscal
years 1999 and 2000 Annual Performance Plans, which support the
Strategic Plan and specify annual goals and objectives.
FNS has incorporated most program and policy changes into
its annual performance plan. Goals are results-oriented and
linked to the specific budget requests. The resources required
to achieve these goals are provided in the Annual Performance
Plans at the strategic goal level. A matrix format is used to
link these resources to the major program activities outlined
in the Program and Financing schedules.
The agency's performance goals show that coordination
exists among other agencies in USDA and the Government
regarding its programs and activities. These include the
project FNS is coordinating with the States and the Electronic
Benefits Transfer Council of the National Automated
Clearinghouse Association, and the Social Security
Administration to ensure that food stamp benefits are not
issued to the deceased, and the Economic Research Service [ERS]
which manages the research programs for the food assistance
programs at FNS. FNS has made a strong effort not to duplicate
research programs performed by the ERS.
FNS uses data such as Food Stamp Program participation,
school lunch and breakfast meal service data, general economic
indicators, and demographic data as the basis for budget
projections. The program performance data generates the
necessary information to support its performance plan and
budget requests. However, FNS does have a number of performance
indicators for which reliable data will not be available for
inclusion in the first Annual Performance Report because
validation of administrative data is not possible by using
evaluations or other independent mechanisms. The agency is
working to revise its strategic plan to better reflect its
unifying mission and purposes and to make the plan more useful
as a strategic management tool. The agency claims that the loss
of funding for studies and evaluations to ERS has significantly
hampered its ability to develop new analytical and evaluation
tools to measure and report performance.
FNS has faced the task of cracking down on fraud, waste,
and abuse associated with the Food Stamp Program for many
years. Several reports from the Office of Inspector General and
the GAO have addressed this problem. The agency faces this
fraud and waste by overpayments to food stamp recipients and by
food stamp trafficking. The agency's performance goals include
an increase of 38 States delivering food stamp benefits through
the Electronic Benefits Transfer which is thought to decrease
the trafficking of food stamps. The performance goals also
reflect the agency's dependence on grocery stores to properly
handle food stamps as an external factor that affects the
agency's ability to achieve this goal. To address this, the
plan cites that the agency promulgated rules for participating
stores to follow and instituted a system of sanctions that may
be applied to stores that violate the rules.
The Subcommittee was not consulted regarding the agency's
performance plan. The agency is currently integrating all of
its current planning activities, including the development and
execution of strategic and annual performance plans, into a
single process that will involve all FNS staff including the
budget staff. This will ensure that all the employees involved
with Federal nutrition assistance will understand and achieve
the agency's key goals and objectives.
The agency does not plan to make any changes in the account
structure since the current budget structure is set up by major
program and account activity. The performance plan is
informative to the Subcommittee and is useful in providing
oversight and making budget decisions for the FNS because the
linkage with the goals and plan cross-link to the budget
priorities presented in the President's budget request.
Natural Resources Conservation Service
One of the main performance goals of the Natural Resources
Conservation Service [NRCS] is a healthy and productive land
that sustains food and fiber production and functioning
watersheds and natural systems, enhances the environment, and
improves urban and rural landscapes. The achievement of these
performance goals supports achievement of USDA's goal to
promote sustainable production of food and fiber products while
maintaining a quality environment and strong natural resource
base. The goals and measures are results-oriented through
assistance to producers to: (1) plan and apply systems to
protect and enhance cropland and grazing lands, (2) protect
water against agricultural nonpoint sources of pollution, (3)
protect watersheds against flood damages, and (4) preserve land
for agricultural use. All of NRCS's goals are challenging and
can be realistically met.
The performance goals established in the agency performance
plan are cross-cutting goals that are supported by multiple
activities in the budget structure. The performance goals
provide a way for managers and the public to see the outcome on
the landscape that results from the agency's services that are
funded through separate accounts. This comprehensive view of
agency performance is not possible when performance is measured
program-by-program.
The agency performance plans for fiscal years 1999 and 2000
include a summary table that quantifies the relationship
between each program and resource objective in the agency
strategic plan. For programs that support multiple objectives,
however, allocation among objectives is only estimated. The
combined data that will be available from the new time and
attendance reporting system, the performance measurement system
and the workload analysis activity will provide information for
planning and will be the basis for allocation of funds,
enabling managers to ensure that funds and time are expended on
the objectives that were intended.
In addition to the cross-cutting goals, each program in the
budget structure continues to set program-specific goals for
activities and outputs that must be achieved in order to attain
the higher-level performance measures.
The Chief of the NRCS has ensured that there is a clear
focus on performance-based management at the highest level. The
Chief realigned the headquarters structure, consolidating
responsibility for strategic planning, performance planning and
measurement, budget allocation, and oversight and evaluation
under a Deputy Chief for Strategic Planning and Accountability.
The new Deputy Chief was directed to develop and implement a
new accountability system that would provide a balanced,
reliable, and timely picture of the agency's performance. The
system will enable agency managers to estimate the effect of
programs on the condition of natural resources systems, assess
the cost-effectiveness of service delivery, identify
opportunities for process improvement, and respond to
customers' needs with strategies and assistance tailored to
local conditions. Also, action has been taken to ensure that
reliable high quality information is available to achieve
performance-based management within NRCS. In fiscal year 1999,
the agency began implementation of the new accountability
system, which includes data in three major categories.
Action has been taken to ensure that funding is linked to
performance. New procedures are being implemented to define
performance expectations when budgets are allocated to
managers.
Agency-wide goals for key performance measures are set in
the agency performance plan, based on the long-term goals in
the strategic plan. In addition, goals for program-specific
activities or outputs are established. As the performance
measurement system becomes fully operational, specific State
goals will be established for each performance measure. An
appropriate element will be included in State and regional
conservationists' individual performance appraisals. The
regional conservationists will monitor the progress of States
for which they are responsible and hold State conservationists
accountable for meeting goals. The Deputy Chief for Strategic
Planning and Accountability will monitor performance nationally
and report to the Associate Chief, who will hold Deputy Chiefs
and regional conservationists accountable.
Measurable long-term outcome strategic objectives that
support the agency's mission are established in the strategic
plan. Annual performance goals are set to move toward
achievement of the strategic goals and objectives. Line
managers will be assigned responsibility for specific portions
of each agency goal when they receive their allocation for a
fiscal year. They will develop operating budgets that use their
funds and staff to meet the established goals and conduct all
activities needed to achieve the goals. Employees will report
their accomplishments on key performance measures on a
continuous basis and will report how their time was spent by
program and major activity. Data will be available on a real-
time basis so that employees and first-line supervisors can
monitor progress. Senior managers will review performance and
financial data periodically to ensure efficient and effective
use of resources and to take corrective action when necessary.
In addition to the changes in management information
systems, NRCS has established a team to analyze field office
operations and identify internally-imposed requirements and
procedures that add little value and reduce the time that front
line staff can devote to direct services to customers. NRCS is
implementing the team's recommendations, thus allowing
employees to focus more attention on directly serving customers
and completing high priority conservation work.
NRCS is developing plans to ensure that all agency
personnel maintain the level of technical expertise essential
to meeting goals. An interdisciplinary team conducted a review
of how the agency delivers appropriate conservation technology
to field personnel and made recommendations for improvement,
which NRCS is implementing. A separate review of training for
the field offices has resulted in a comprehensive catalog of
available training, including self-paced, satellite, agency-
provided formal course-work, and non-agency training. The
review made further recommendations for improving technical
training.
When NRCS's accountability system is fully implemented, it
will have more detailed information on results achieved and the
time required to achieve them by geographic area. NRCS will be
able to more accurately estimate expected performance at
alternative levels of funding than was possible with
information available earlier, which generally supported only
generalized national estimates. NRCS will be able to identify
the causes of any shortfall in expected performance and to
determine corrective action needed. Where reliable information
demonstrates that performance shortfalls result from
insufficient resources directed to a problem, NRCS will provide
Congress with a firm basis for making its decisions on future
funding.
The fiscal years 1999 and 2000 performance plans include a
summary table that attempts to allocate all agency funds among
the natural resources objectives established in the strategic
plan, thereby indicating the full costs associated with the
objective. NRCS time and financial systems in the past have not
been designed to track costs by resource outcome. Therefore, at
present NRCS can only estimate full costs of objectives.
NRCS has had two Results Act briefings for the Subcommittee
over the last fiscal year. The performance plan is informative
and will be extremely useful as a tool to pinpoint the agency's
use of salaries and expenses, which is not specifically
addressed in past budget submissions.
SUBCOMMITTEE ON COMMERCE, JUSTICE, AND STATE, THE JUDICIARY, AND
RELATED AGENCIES
TITLE I--DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
The Justice Department is responsible for the investigation
and prosecution, the detention of those accused, and the
imprisonment of those convicted of Federal crimes. Justice also
distributes billions of dollars in grants to State and local
law enforcement agencies.
Justice has aggressively pursued the development of
performance measures. GPRA performance measures are a routine
part of annual budget submissions. Component agency strategic
plans, which lay out core missions and goals, are used to
formulate individual ``contracts'' for key managers. These
contracts describe agency expectations for a given manager and
are the basis upon which a manager's competence is judged.
The Subcommittee should exercise judgment in using GPRA-
inspired performance measures to judge the success or failure
of an agency. Oftentimes, the easiest factors to quantify are
the least revealing. For example, the number of arrests made by
an agency is easy to count and catalog. However, total arrests
provide no insight as to the quality of those arrests. To be of
value, total arrests must be cross-referenced with total
successful prosecutions. Similarly, performance measures can
generate perverse outcomes at odds with agency goals. In
counting successful prosecutions, for example, were tough but
far-reaching prosecutions avoided in favor of easy but
insignificant cases in order to boost a score? Does counting
prosecutions prompt a ``win at all cost'' mentality among
attorneys that has nothing to do with the pursuit of justice?
GPRA will not eliminate the need for careful analysis on the
part of the Subcommittee.
GPRA-generated data may also fail to address key
Subcommittee concerns. The single biggest concern the
Subcommittee has with Justice is the inability to get clear
insight into the details of billions of dollars of ``base''
funds included in the Department's budget. Performance measures
matter little when the Subcommittee is unable to ascertain how
money is being spent beyond vague ``object classes'' that
obscure as much as they illuminate. For example, though
counter-terrorism is a core mission for Justice, though reams
of material on the strategies and tactics of combating
terrorism have been generated, and though very definite
measures of effectiveness exist, the Subcommittee still cannot
determine how much money the FBI is spending on Special Weapons
and Tactics and sniper teams in its field offices and on the
Hostage Rescue Teams in Quantico, Virginia. GPRA is not well-
suited to identify budget issues.
TITLE II--DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE AND RELATED AGENCIES
International Trade Commission
The International Trade Commission (the Commission) is a
nonpartisan, quasi-judicial agency that serves as a fact-
finder, investigator, and adjudicator with regard to Federal
trade practices. The Commission's performance plan is
comprehensive and includes many good ideas on improving the
Commission's method of conducting its investigations and
providing information to its users. The goals stated in the
plan do focus on the two most important functions the Agency
has: its adjudicative/investigative function and its research/
fact finding function. However, the performance plan divides
the Agency's functions into five groups. The performance
indicators for these groups seem to overlap for the
investigations and then again for the research program, trade
information services, and trade policy support.
The performance goals are reasonably challenging and
reflect a balance among competing demands upon the Agency; yet,
they do not sufficiently link individual employee performance
to the obligations of the Commission. The Results Act was
implemented as a means for government agencies to re-evaluate
programs for effectiveness and efficiency. The performance
measures are to be linked to results of individual's efforts.
The Commission's plan is not totally in-step with this vision.
One performance measurement the Commission proposes is to
track how long an investigation takes. The length of time that
a case or investigation remains open does not necessarily
indicate the Commission's efficiency or effectiveness in
working on it. Performance may be better linked to hours each
individual spends working on a task and the number of employees
needed to accomplish each activity.
The Subcommittee noted that the performance indicators as
stated do not seem to include quality control mechanisms while
emphasizing timeliness. It is desirable to shorten procedures
as long as the integrity of the outcome is not jeopardized. The
Commission's intention to maintain the quality of its products
has been mentioned to the Subcommittee, although not explicitly
in the strategic plan. The Commission found that the Results
Act focuses on objectively measurable goals, and it had
difficulty in structuring its plan because statutory
requirements direct how investigations are conducted, thus
limiting the Commission's ability to make meaningful goals.
According to the plan, the Commission intends to measure
its performance results in part by providing surveys to
participating individuals and commissioners to get those
individuals' subjective feedback on how the Commission is doing
and what would be more useful to the Commission's consumers.
Although this type of input is worthwhile, its subjective
nature may make the data's reliability questionable. The
Subcommittee was informed by the Commission that it believes
that it will have reliable data for all performance measures
for trade information services by March 2000.
The Subcommittee would be interested to learn more about
how the Commission incorporates similar activities within the
different investigations it undertakes to make the processes
more effective.
The Subcommittee is concerned by the Commission's third
strategic goal of obtaining increased use of its research
products. The Subcommittee endorses making trade information
more readily available to those individuals who request it.
However, the Commission's choice of measurement is perplexing
since it requires obtaining software (which the Commission is
not sure is available at a reasonable cost) that will allow the
Commission to search for mentions of its name and trade reports
in Congressional debates. This is not an effective use of the
Commission's scarce resources. Another stated performance
indicator of this goal is to count the number of Members of
Congress that testify as witnesses in hearings. Because Members
of Congress are not employees of the Commission, their
testimony is not indicative of the Commission's performance.
This does not seem to be relevant to how accurate the
Commission's trade reports are or whether its investigations
and adjudications are fair.
The Commission's plan is clear and coherent so that it
informs the reader. The plan's annual performance goals, the
mission, and the strategic plan reflect the same concepts and
ideas. The creation of the strategic plan forced the Commission
to reevaluate its objectives and formally establish goals and
measurements. However, in discussions with the budget staff, it
appears that true linkage of the performance plan, strategy,
and goals with daily activities and the budget process has not
occurred. Compliance seems to generate more work and additional
paper that were not previously part of the Commission's working
framework.
The Subcommittee notes that the Commission staff has made
extra efforts to consult with this Subcommittee about how it
can improve its budget presentation to better meet the needs of
Congress. Currently, the strategic plan is helpful to the
Subcommittee in giving an overview of how the Commission
intends to function. The strategic plan would be of more
assistance to appropriators if it provided more details, such
as how many investigations would be completed within a given
quarter of time. This is information that a budget office
usually compiles as part of its budget formulation process, and
it would be relevant to both the budget and the strategic
plans. Overall, the Subcommittee would like to see the
Commission perfect its goals by focusing more on items it
currently documents without having to implement new systems
with possibly unreliable results.
DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE
The Department of Commerce Annual Performance Plan (Plan)
for fiscal year 2000 outlines 3 strategic themes. Given the
diverse missions of the Department's myriad agencies, the Plan
is stronger in some areas than others. For example, it is
easier to quantify and measure increased lead time for severe
weather warnings than it is to determine whether the Department
is successful in advancing ``the public interest in
telecommunications, mass media and information.'' In general,
the Department's Plan presents reasonable programmatic goals
and adequate means to measure their achievement. However, the
portions of the Plan describing the Department's management
strategy seem to lack the detail and focus found in the Plan's
programmatic activities.
For example, the Subcommittee continues to be concerned
about the Department's ability to manage its finances. The Plan
does not provide sufficient detail about steps the Department
plans to take in fiscal year 2000 to improve its financial
management systems. Millions of dollars have been appropriated
to assist the Department in updating its financial management
systems, and little detail is provided in the Department's Plan
to outline how these funds were spent and what steps will be
taken to improve the management and control of the significant
resources provided by Congress for Departmental programs. It is
reasonable for the Subcommittee to expect the Plan to provide a
timetable for the deployment of a new Department-wide financial
management system by agency. It is not enough for the
Department to say that its goal is clean financial audits as if
such audits are in and of themselves sufficient proof of
improved financial management. The Department's need for
improved financial management has been a concern of the
Subcommittee for the past 3 fiscal years, and was the subject
of an Inspector General report in fiscal year 1997. The failure
of the Department to outline specific goals and procedures to
implement improved financial management and controls undermines
the credibility of its detailed programmatic performance goals.
In short, if the Department cannot account for funds it is
given to conduct programs, how can the Subcommittee determine
if the goals are being effectively and efficiently achieved?
Of particular concern in this regard is the decennial
census. The Plan states that a new pilot financial management
system was implemented at the Bureau of the Census in fiscal
year 1998. The only information provided in the Plan about the
pilot was that a major accounting firm ``completed an
Independent Verification and Validation * * * of the pilot.''
The decennial census has been identified by the GAO as a high-
risk program which could have problems. The financial
management of the decennial census is given inadequate
attention in the Department's Plan, which is unacceptable to
the Subcommittee.
The Subcommittee expects the Department's future Plans to
more fully integrate financial management and controls with
programmatic goals. Program goals and the funds to achieve
these goals are not mutually exclusive concepts, and the
Department would do well to recognize this.
TITLE III--THE JUDICIARY
While the Federal judiciary is not covered by GPRA, it does
incorporate many GPRA tenets into its budget planning
procedures and has responded to the Subcommittee in that
context. The judiciary's goals are results-oriented. The annual
statistics provided to the Subcommittee about the number of
cases adjudicated, appeals heard, etc., tell little as to
efficiency of the Federal judiciary. It would be helpful if
GPRA tenets were used by the judiciary to demonstrate to the
Subcommittee how it is making strides in controlling what it
believes to be uncontrollable costs, such as rental payments
and staffing. For example, the Subcommittee has difficulty
understanding substantially increased staff requests every year
when computer modernization and other technological advances
should have made court procedures much more efficient.
The judiciary's workload is largely controlled by what
crimes the Congress federalizes. Since the judiciary has no
control over what crimes will be committed in the next fiscal
year, it must rely on estimates for its budget requests. In
many instances the judiciary has done a good job of estimating
future requirements. The Subcommittee believes that this
intense focus on planning for unknown budget scenarios has
distracted the judiciary from another important goal of
ensuring that the cases it administers are handled in an
expedient and efficient manner.
TITLE IV--DEPARTMENT OF STATE
The State Department (State) is responsible for the conduct
of foreign affairs. State is struggling to develop meaningful
performance measures. Not only is the art of diplomacy nearly
impossible to quantify, but the conduct of American foreign
policy is subject to so many outside influences--the President,
Congress, interest groups, other nations, international, non-
governmental, and transnational organizations, and
international business--that attributing success or failure
solely to State in any overseas endeavor is misleading at best.
This will prove frustrating to the Subcommittee. GPRA-
related measures of effectiveness will be most beneficial in
judging administrative support: information technology,
construction and maintenance, security, and the like. Judgments
regarding United States interactions with other nations will
likely remain highly subjective. Partisan differences will
further complicate a clear-eyed analysis of the effectiveness
of State initiatives.
TITLE V--RELATED AGENCIES
Commission on Civil Rights
The Commission on Civil Rights has had some difficulties in
the past with program planning and budgeting. The agency seems
to be making a concerted effort to improve financial management
and control by requiring more in-depth management reports which
tie current activities to resources used according to project
plan and to link account and activities to budget
justifications.
Federal Communications Commission
The Federal Communications Commission [FCC] is in the
process of updating its financial management systems and its
cost accounting system to permit the agency to more efficiently
capture performance management data. The FCC has held several
hearings with industry, consumers, State and local governments
and other interested parties to gauge improvements which could
be implemented to improve agency performance.
The Subcommittee observes that whether or not Congress
approves any future restructuring of the agency, it is critical
that the FCC continue to make improvements in its operations
based on its current structure, particularly with regard to
backlogs in consumer complaints and pending applications. The
Subcommittee further notes that the FCC has indicated
difficulty in using the Results Act as a basis for funding
requests because the ``timing between the assessment of
performance and the submission of an agency's budget is not
synchronized.'' The Subcommittee considers this a good
observation and raises a question about whether the Results Act
can be used uniformly as a management tool government-wide.
Federal Trade Commission
The Federal Trade Commission [FTC] has instituted quarterly
reviews of its performance measures and its budgetary
resources. The agency appears to have institutionalized these
reviews to be able to use information gained in its annual
budget process. The FTC has advised the Subcommittee that it
has used the process to streamline agency operations. The
agency's budget submission effectively tied its strategic plan
to its request.
Maritime Administration
The Maritime Administration [MARAD] in the Department of
Transportation is responsible for administering several
programs for the maritime industry relating to U.S. foreign and
domestic commerce and for national defense purposes. These
include operating the Maritime Security Program, the Merchant
Marine Academy, and the Title XI loan guarantee program.
MARAD appears to be moving in the direction of results-
oriented goals, and its mission and goals are relatively easy
to meet. One measure of MARAD's effectiveness is the Title XI
loan program. The Subcommittee can easily observe the program's
operation, and it appears to be working efficiently and as
designed.
While MARAD does have a different jurisdiction than the
Federal Maritime Commission, it would seem that these two small
agencies could be combined, and perhaps some budgetary savings
and efficiencies might be realized.
Federal Maritime Commission
The Federal Maritime Commission (the Commission) is an
independent regulatory agency charged with administering
several laws relating to the waterborne domestic and foreign
offshore commerce of the United States.
The Commission's goals are fairly well defined and can be
met, and its programs and goals are oriented toward meeting
those objectives. Recently, its main focus has been on
implementing the Ocean Shipping Reform Act. This implementation
is not easily observed by the Subcommittee, and the Results Act
might be better used by the Commission to demonstrate to the
Subcommittee the problems with this implementation.
Furthermore, the Commission could show how it is meeting the
goals of the statute and how it plans to avoid unintended
consequences in the process.
While the Commission does have a different jurisdiction
than the Maritime Administration, it would seem that these two
small agencies could be combined, and perhaps some budgetary
savings and efficiencies might be realized.
SUBCOMMITTEE ON DEFENSE
i. performance goals and measures
The Department of Defense [DOD], in its Results Act
Performance Plan for fiscal year 2000, has compiled a
comprehensive plan designed to implement a management strategy
based on the Quadrennial Defense Review [QDR] submitted to
Congress in May of 1997.
In 1997, Secretary of Defense William Cohen announced some
specific goals of the QDR when he unveiled the plan to the
press:
``First, that the defense strategy developed in the
QDR process must be the basis for all other QDR
decisions and analyses. The success of the QDR is
directly a result of our ability to adhere to the
principle that the QDR be strategy-based.
``Second, that we should not make any unrealistic
assumptions about the threat, about operations, about
support costs which have been consistently
underestimated in recent years, and about those program
schedules and costs as well, so I wanted realistic
assumptions.'' \1\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ DOD News Briefing, Monday, May 19, 1997--2:30 p.m. Subject:
Quadrennial Defense Review. http://www.defenselink.mil:80/news/May
1997/t051997__t0519qdr.html.
DOD is in a unique situation when it comes to projecting
plans into the future. DOD budget submissions are based on
Five-Year Defense Plans [FYDP]. The Results Act Performance
Plan for fiscal year 2000 should be nothing more than a road
map on how to implement that budget, using the QDR as a
parallel document.
The QDR sets out very clear, specific goals for DOD's long-
term strategy and mission goals. According to the report
submitted to Congress, ``Building on the President's National
Security Strategy, we determined that U.S. defense strategy for
the near and long term must continue to shape the strategic
environment to advance U.S. interests, maintain the capability
to respond to the full spectrum of threats, and prepare now for
the threats and dangers of tomorrow and beyond.'' \2\
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\2\ Report of the Quadrennial Defense Review, William S. Cohen,
Secretary of Defense. May 1997. p.2. http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/
qdr/msg.html.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
DOD, in its fiscal year 2000 report, has revised prior
goals from a series of six corporate goals into two corporate
goals. The stated reason is to ``more accurately reflect the
necessary resource trade-offs between current and future
needs''.
The two corporate goals presented in the report are
consistent with the QDR. The goals of the fiscal year 2000
report are to ``shape and respond'', and to ``prepare''.
Each executive agency covered by the Results Act must
develop a multi-year strategic plan that identifies the
fundamental mission of the agency, general goals that would be
used to achieve the mission, and resources needed to accomplish
the mission.
DOD does a good job of complying with this requirement. The
goals and measures focused on in the report are those that are
the most important to DOD's overall mission. The report states
very clearly the Department's missions and roles.
However, the missions presented in the report are somewhat
vague and do not present a clear, specific focus. Rather, they
are sufficiently vague and all-encompassing to allow any action
taken by the Department to be fit into the stated strategy
after-the-fact. This would seem to be an enormous burden to
managers in developing strategic plans based on finite goals
with which to compare their progress.
DOD's goals and measures are output-oriented. The goals are
clear, objective results which in many cases, will be easily
identifiable. For example, the plan includes goals to maintain
specific numbers of troop strength and ensure the quality of
those personnel. This goal can be assessed based on
quantifiable analysis through the Department's ``Active
Component Enlisted Retention Rates'', as well as through
``Quality Benchmarks for Enlisted Recruits''.
The goals are clear cut and well-defined. However, the
means of achieving these goals is somewhat ambiguous. While DOD
has crafted well-thought out objective measures of achieving
its goals, its mission statement makes it difficult to achieve
those goals.
In the area of Army deployment tempo, for example, DOD sets
out an admirable goal of moving from 18 units deploying more
than 120 days per year to 0, but its mission statement does not
give great confidence that it will be able to meet this goal.
DOD claims it will be able to go everywhere and anywhere, and
it seems that in fact it does.
According to DOD's report, ``Today's security environment
presents the same pressing needs for military forces as existed
when the QDR was conducted. The force-level objectives for
fiscal year 2000 are, therefore, largely the same as the goals
set in the QDR. The intent of these goals is to provide forces
that can fight and win two major theater wars nearly
simultaneously. At the same time, the goals reflect the fact
that the United States must remain prepared to respond to
smaller-scale contingencies. Although they are much less
demanding than major theater wars, smaller-scale contingencies
can become a very high priority, particularly when swift
intervention of military forces is needed to contain, resolve,
or mitigate the consequences of a conflict that could otherwise
become far more costly and deadly.
``Because crises can arise quickly, U.S. military forces
must be continuously ready to respond * * *. In recognition of
the need to more closely monitor tempo across the force, the
Joint Staff, in coordination with the Services, has instituted
a tempo management process. The metric, for each Service, is
the number of units exceeding its tempo goal.'' \3\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\3\ Government Performance and Results Act Performance Plan for
Fiscal Year 2000, Department of Defense, p. 7. http://www.dtic.mil/
execsec/adr1999/apdx__j.html.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
However, if the Pentagon has had this difficult of a time
meeting these goals to date, how will they change? The report
does not explain how the herculean task of reducing deployment
tempo will be accomplished--only that it will be accomplished.
The report defines the metric to evaluate whether or not the
goal is being met, but does not describe what is going to
change to make meeting these goals likely. Will there be some
sort of policy change? Or perhaps, there will be some other
fundamental change in the way DOD deploys troops so that these
goals will be met. The goals are very aggressive, and without
some description of how they will be met, these goals are
nothing more than good intentions.
As the United States military is tasked with many more and
new humanitarian missions, it is essential to define when,
where and how troops will be used. The ``calculus'' which is
referred to in the DOD report must be clear cut and objective,
not subjective criteria used after forces are already committed
to justify the action rather than being the guidance for the
decision to commit or not commit forces.
The report states that ``In all cases where the commitment
of U.S. forces is considered, determining whether the
associated costs and risks are commensurate with the U.S.
interests at stake should be the central calculus of U.S.
decisions. Such decisions should also depend on the United
States' ability to identify a clear mission, the desired end
state of the situation, and the exit strategy for the forces
committed.'' \4\ However, the report never defines that
``calculus'' in a significant, objective way.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\4\ Government Performance and Results Act Performance Plan for
Fiscal Year 2000, Department of Defense, p. 2. http://www.dtic.mil/
execsec/adr1999/apdx__j.html
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The goals and measures in the report are well-defined and
laid out. The measurement criteria are also well defined. Among
others, the plan includes goals to maintain specified levels of
forces, flying hours, tank miles and steaming days, personnel
force levels as well as numbers of units deploying for more
than a specified time period. This data will prove useful in
determining whether or not DOD has met its stated goals.
However, the report does not explain in detail how certain
measurement data will be derived. Specifically, the report
refers to associated costs and risks as the central calculus of
U.S. decisions and as the determining factor in deciding
whether or not to deploy U.S. forces. Unfortunately, this
subjective measurement is neither fully developed nor explained
anywhere in the report.
Additionally, when asked about the involvement of senior
executives and other key managers being held accountable for
achieving results, the Department of Defense responded as
follows:
``DOD component heads are held accountable by a number of
management processes used within the Department. Each year when
the components submit budget proposals to the Secretary, the
objectives that the Secretary has set for each component are
compared with the performance levels that would be achieved in
the next budget and the five years that follow. Additionally,
in the context of GPRA, senior managers are responsible for
reporting results against the performance goals set in the
annual performance report. Senior managers are also responsible
for verifying and validating the results that they report. The
acquisition system holds managers accountable with periodic
reviews of the progress of major acquisition programs and major
reviews that coincide with each milestone in the acquisition
process. The Defense Management Council [DMC] monitors the
progress of management reforms instituted in the Defense Reform
Initiative [DRI]. One of the mechanisms used by the DMC to
define goals and monitor progress is the performance contracts
that have been established for defense agencies. Another
example is the management of force readiness. The Department
monitors day-to-day readiness of its forces through two senior
forms: the Joint Monthly Readiness Review [JMRR] and the Senior
Readiness Oversight Council [SROC]. The detailed work reflected
in the JMRR is summarized in a Department-wide readiness review
presented monthly to the SROC. The key results of these reviews
are forwarded to the Congress in the form of the Quarterly
Readiness Report to Congress [QRRC]. The QRRC will also include
the classified readiness measures that have been developed for
the GPRA annual performance plan and report.'' \5\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\5\ Office of the Secretary of Defense, October 4, 1999, response
of Mr. James L. Johnson, Deputy Director, Theater Assessments and
Planning.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Department of Defense's Results Act Performance Plan
for fiscal year 2000 notes that ``there are several national
security issues that the Department addresses as part of an
interagency team. * * * DOD provides technical support to the
Federal Bureau of Investigation in its efforts to combat
terrorism, including potential terrorist use of weapons of mass
destruction. DOD likewise works closely with the Department of
Justice and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to ensure
the security of the increasingly interconnected and vulnerable
U.S. infrastructures against physical or cyber attack. DOD also
works closely with FEMA to prepare for and respond to natural
disasters. Finally, DOD conducts airborne and seaborne
surveillance of high-intensity drug-trafficking routes in
support of the White House Office of National Drug Control
Policy.'' \6\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\6\ Government Performance and Results Act Performance Plan for
Fiscal Year 2000, Department of Defense, p. 2. http://www.dtic.mil/
execsec/adr1999/apdx__j.html.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The DOD report does not do an adequate job of addressing or
explaining its coordination for cross-cutting efforts.
According to the GAO, ``the plan does not sufficiently
explain coordination with other agencies that conduct related
activities. For example, it does not discuss how DOD
coordinates with State and other agencies that cooperate in a
number of programs and activities aimed at helping to shape the
international environment.'' \7\
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\7\ Observations on the Department of Defense's Annual Performance
Plan for fiscal year 2000. General Accounting Office. April 22, 1999.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
ii. data reliability
The report leaves cause for concern with regard to the
credibility of data from DOD's financial, accounting, and other
information systems. The Pentagon's plan does not provide
detail on how improvements will be made to existing systems and
what new systems will be implemented. GAO notes that ``while
DOD's performance plan discusses data verification and
validation for some performance measures and indicators, and it
acknowledges that data for certain measures and indicators come
from financial and accounting systems that have experienced
problems, it provides only limited confidence that the
performance information will be credible. To remedy accounting
systems shortcomings, DOD has developed a financial management
improvement plan. However, as we reported, the improvement plan
has several critical omissions which, unless they are
effectively addressed in the near term, will impair the
implementation of a sound foundation for fundamentally
reforming DOD's financial management operations.''
GAO also noted that ``DOD Inspector General and service
audit organizations have reported that DOD's financial systems
are not in compliance with Federal systems requirements and
applicable Federal accounting standards. These problems limit
the reliability and timeliness of currently available financial
information needed to effectively manage operations. Moreover,
the audit organizations have repeatedly found systems to be
inadequate for measuring the cost of operations and programs.''
Additionally, GAO notes that ``although the plan states
that there are no known data deficiencies for some performance
measures and indicators audits continue to identify significant
problems with the data integrity of DOD financial systems and
supporting cost, logistical, and operations information
systems. For example, the plan states that there are no known
deficiencies in the data collection process related to the
performance measure for the disposal of unneeded government
property held by contractors. That measure supports the annual
performance goal to meet combat forces' needs `smarter and
faster'. However, accurately accounting for and controlling
contractor-held assets has been a long-standing issue at DOD. A
1997 report by the DOD Inspector General recommended that DOD
develop short- and long-term solutions to the financial
accountability and reporting problems regarding government
property in the possession of contractors. In response the
Department has set out an action plan with action steps for
this area scheduled to be completed by October 1999.
``This year's plan is moderately improved over last year's
in that it demonstrates some degree of progress in addressing
credibility of performance information weaknesses we and others
identified in last year's plan. Specifically, last year's plan
did not address known data and systems deficiencies, the degree
to which these deficiencies affect specific performance
information, or planned actions to address these deficiencies.
Furthermore, the plan did not identify the extent to which
external evaluations such as audits would be used in the
performance information validation process.
``Improvements in this year's plan in this area include
discussions on (1) verifying and validating data such as that
generated by the components' automated inventory data
collection systems; (2) known data and systems limitations for
performance metrics, such as using Selected Acquisition Reports
data as an absolute measure of research and development and
procurement cost performance; and (3) planned actions to
address data or systems deficiencies such as enhancing the
interface among the military services and defense agencies to
overcome data systems interoperability problems related to the
location of inventory. However, this year's plan does not
address how external evaluations will be used.'' \8\
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\8\ Observations on the Department of Defense's Annual Performance
Plan for fiscal year 2000. General Accounting Office. April 22, 1999.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The success of performance-based management hinges on the
quality of information an organization produces to manage
programs and measure success. Unfortunately, the inadequacy of
information systems at the Department, according to GAO,
provides limited confidence that performance information will
be credible. The report falls short on the explanation of
methodologies and ``metrics'' which serve as the basis for the
criteria used to evaluate the goals set forth in the report. It
would be helpful if the report explained in greater detail how
those metrics were going to be built and provided greater
detail on the source of the raw data.
It is important to keep in mind the amount of information
that confronts DOD as an organization each month. Nonetheless,
financial and information systems at DOD remain flawed, and
cannot produce verifiable performance information in most
areas. DOD must redouble efforts to ensure that its data
capacity meets the tremendous need outlined in its performance
plan.
iii. high risk problems
In January 1999, GAO submitted a report which addresses
DOD's major performance and management challenges. The various
challenges addressed by GAO were categorized into two areas:
(1) systemic management challenges dealing with financial
management, information management, weapon systems acquisition,
and contract management; and (2) program management challenges
dealing with infrastructure, inventory management, and
personnel.\9\
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\9\ Major Management Challenges and Program Risks--Department of
Defense. GAO/OCG-99-4.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The DOD report included performance goals, measures, and
indicators related to six of nine major management challenges
identified by the GAO and/or the DOD Inspector General.
MANAGEMENT CHALLENGE:
1. Financial Management.--GAO reported that DOD's problems
range from being unable to properly account for billions of
dollars in assets to being unable to produce reliable and
timely information needed to make sound resource decisions. The
DOD Inspector General reported that DOD remains unable to
comply with laws requiring auditable financial statements for
its major funds and for the Department as a whole.
There was no goal in the plan which addresses this
challenge. However, in late October 1998, DOD issued its first
Biennial Financial Management Improvement Plan, which
established DOD's strategy for managing financial management
operations. According to the Secretary, the plan sets out DOD's
first ever attempt to describe the overall concept for its
future financial management operations.
2. Information Management and Technology.--The GAO reported
that information management and technology issues are key DOD
management challenges. A primary short-term concern centers on
the implementation of the year 2000 conversions of date-
sensitive information on computer systems.
There was no goal in the plan which addresses this
challenge; however, the plan notes that DOD works with other
Federal agencies to ensure the security of the increasingly
interconnected and vulnerable U.S. infrastructures against
physical or cyber attack. Additionally, the Clinger-Cohen Act
of 1996 requires DOD to establish goals for improving the
efficiency and effectiveness of its operations through the use
of information technology. It also requires DOD to include an
annual report with the submission of its budget to the Congress
on its progress in achieving the goals. The current report is
Appendix K in DOD's 1999 Annual Report to the President and the
Congress. The goals are to: (1) become a mission partner; (2)
provide services that satisfy customer needs; (3) reform
information technology management processes to increase
efficiency and mission contribution; and (4) ensure vital
information resources are secure and protected. Appendix K
discusses progress toward achieving these goals and efforts to
meet the technical challenges related to year 2000 compliance.
3. Weapon System Acquisition.--GAO reported that
effectively managing the weapon systems acquisition process
continues to be a concern. Although DOD has increased its
procurement budget, it consistently pays more and takes longer
than planned to develop systems that do not perform as
anticipated.
The DOD IG also reported a compelling need to accelerate
the weapon systems acquisition cycle and reduce per unit costs.
The IG further reported that a significant gap exists between
weapon systems modernization requirements and planned funding.
DOD has a goal to further increase procurement spending, but
the goal relies on shifting about $10 billion of spending a
year from other areas. The IG doubts that planned actions will
free up that amount of funds.
The Performance Plan includes a performance goal to ``meet
combat forces' needs smarter and faster, with products and
services that work better and cost less, by improving the
efficiency of acquisition processes''. The plan includes two
related performance measures: (1) Major Defense Acquisition
Program cost growth; and (2) Successful completion of weapon
system operational test and evaluation events. The plan also
includes a related performance indicator-Major Defense
Acquisition Program cycle time.
4. Contracting.--DOD spends over $100 billion a year
contracting for goods and services. Over the last few years,
several broad-based changes have been made to acquisition and
contracting processes to improve DOD-contractor relationships
and rules. But GAO and the DOD IG continue to identify risks in
contracting, including erroneous, fraudulent, and improper
payments to contractors; payment of higher prices for
commercial spare parts than necessary; and the award and
administration of health care contracts. The DOD IG reported
that the sheer volume and great variety of the contracting
activity make it a high-risk area. The IG also reported a lack
of good cost information and significant levels of fraud,
mostly by providers, in the Defense Health Program.
The Performance Plan includes three performance indicators
that relate to some aspects of contracting: (1) the percentage
of purchases made by purchase card; (2) the percentage of
paperless transactions; and (3) the percentage of paperless
acquisition transactions.
5. Defense Infrastructure.--GAO reported that although DOD
has substantially downsized its force structure over the past 7
to 10 years, it has not reduced operations and support costs--
the costs for its supporting infrastructure--commensurately. A
key reason is that the services are reluctant to consolidate
activities that span service lines and reduce capacity as
necessary. The DOD IG reported that key infrastructure areas
such as transportation, maintenance, facilities, and supply
offer opportunities to reduce costs. The IG noted, however,
that many logical measures are highly controversial and that
the Congress and DOD disagree over additional base closures and
the distribution of workload between DOD and private sector
maintenance facilities.
The Performance Plan includes a performance goal to
``streamline the infrastructure by redesigning the Departments
support structure and pursuing business practice reforms.'' Key
related performance measures include: (1) the number of
positions subject to A-76 competition studies; (2) logistics
response time; (3) the dollar amount of National Defense
Stockpile disposals and reductions in the supply inventory; and
(4) disposals of excess real property.
Other key related performance indicators include: (1) the
percentage of budget spent on infrastructure; (2) the
percentage of materiel assets that are visible and accessible
to its Integrated Materiel Managers; and (3) the net operating
results of working capital funds.
6. Inventory Management.--GAO reported that DOD's inventory
management practices continue to be ineffective and inefficient
and are not well-suited to meet new missions and war-fighting
strategies. As a result, DOD spends more than necessary to
procure inventory, yet items are not available when needed. The
DOD IG also reported shortages of spare parts and that war
reserves are overstocked in some locations but short of
critical items in others. The IG additionally reported problems
with fraud and inappropriate practices in the disposal process.
The Performance Plan includes two performance measures
related to inventory management: (1) logistics response time;
and (2) the dollar amount of National Defense Stockpile
disposals and reductions in the supply inventory. The plan also
includes two related performance indicators: (1) the percentage
of materiel assets that are visible and accessible to its
Integrated Materiel Managers; and (2) the dollar amount of
unfunded depot maintenance requirements.
7. Military Personnel.--GAO reported that DOD's personnel
programs to recruit, train, and retain a high-quality active-
duty enlisted workforce have not received the management
attention needed to ensure their successful operation. The
military services recruit tens of thousands of new enlistees
each year who fail to complete their contracts. The Performance
Plan includes a performance goal to ``recruit, retain, and
develop personnel to maintain a highly skilled and motivated
force capable of meeting tomorrow's challenges.'' The plan
includes three related performance measures: (1) the number of
enlisted recruits inducted into the Active Force and into the
Selected Reserve; (2) the Active Force components enlisted
retention rates; and (3) the Selected Reserves' enlisted
attrition rates. The plan also includes a related performance
indicator. It is the percentage of enlisted recruits that meet
quality benchmarks (high school diplomas, etc.) for such
recruits.
8. Military Readiness.--The DOD IG reported that DOD has
difficulties in maintaining sufficient military readiness. The
IG reported a concern about the accuracy of reporting for unit-
level readiness; weaknesses in chemical and biological defense
preparedness and in communications capability; impact of
changes in the threat environment; and impact of currently
approved budget levels.
The Performance Plan includes a performance goal to
``maintain ready forces and ensure they have the training
necessary to provide the United States with the ability to
shape the international environment and respond to the full
range of crises.'' The plan includes classified measures for
the readiness of each service's forces.
The plan also includes several related performance
indicators, including: (1) the amount of time military
personnel are deployed; (2) number of flying hours per month,
by service; (3) number of tank miles per year; (4) number of
steaming days per quarter; and (5) classified indicators for
the percentage of billets filled in each service.
9. Turbulence From Change.--The DOD IG reported that all
functional areas within DOD are engaged in fundamental reform
and process reengineering efforts at the same time, causing
turbulence. The turbulence brings with it several additional
difficult challenges such as conflicting priorities,
downsizing, outsourcing, dependence on new and unproven systems
or processes, and de-emphasis on management controls and
oversight, all of which are putting considerable strain on DOD.
The IG noted that DOD confronts a huge task in coordinating and
integrating its hundreds of reform initiatives so that they do
not work at cross purposes with each other.
There was no goal in the report which addressed this
challenge; however, the plan and the Secretary's annual report
discuss human capital management issues such as recruiting,
training, operating tempo, and military retention. The
Secretary's annual report also includes chapters on initiatives
such as acquisition reform, financial management reform, and
infrastructure.
iv. consultations
Both DOD and GAO provided consultations with the Defense
Appropriations Subcommittee. These consultations were very
useful. DOD also provided written responses to a series of
questions related to the GPRA report submitted to Congress. The
responsibility for responding to Congress was through Mr. James
L. Johnson, Deputy Director Theater Assessments and Planning.
Mr. Johnson and his staff were very helpful.
v. usefulness
The DOD plan is clear, cogent and coherent. It does a good
job of laying out the specific goals of the Department. The
goals are reduced to 2 major ``corporate goals'', and the
report breaks them down into useful sub-categories. The
explanations make clear what the specific goals are aimed at
doing and ties them in well with the QDR. While clearly stating
goals and measures, the plan lacks information on how DOD will
use performance information to assess mission outcomes.
SUBCOMMITTEE ON MILITARY CONSTRUCTION
The Military Construction Appropriations Subcommittee has
reviewed the DOD Performance Plan for fiscal year 2000.
Further, the Subcommittee evaluated the performance done by GAO
to assess compliance with the Results Act. The Subcommittee
commends the assessment and recommendations presented by GAO
and endorses the more detailed report provided by the Defense
Appropriations Subcommittee.
With respect to military construction, the Department does
not clearly articulate how it intends to modernize, renovate
and improve an aging defense infrastructure as the United
States transitions into the next century. DOD's plan provides
only a partial picture of intended performance across the
Department. For example, it does not include any performance
measures and associated target levels to help decision makers
assess progress toward DOD's goal to achieve a 21st century
infrastructure. The key objective should be to reduce costs
while maintaining military capabilities. The plan notes,
however, that the total dollars spent on infrastructure and
infrastructure costs as a percentage of total defense spending
are metrics used to gauge success in infrastructure reduction.
DOD could improve its plan by using these metrics as
performance measures and establishing associated target
performance levels.
The Subcommittee encourages the Department to establish in
its fiscal year 2001 submission to Congress specific
performance goals and measures that address key indicators
concerning military infrastructure and construction. These
measures should include reduction of real property maintenance
backlogs, improvement of family housing, reduction of family
housing deficits, modernization of unaccompanied personnel
housing, and efforts to address critical shortfalls of quality
of life facilities.
SUBCOMMITTEE ON THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
Legislative History
On October 19, 1994, the District of Columbia Self-
Government and Governmental Reorganization Act (Home Rule Act)
was amended by Public Law 103-373, the Federal Payment
Reauthorization Act of 1994 (Reauthorization Act), to include
performance and financial accountability requirements for the
District government. The amendment required the District
government to devise, implement, and submit to the Congress
comprehensive financial and performance standards. The purpose
of the legislation was to encourage District government
accountability by requiring systematic goal-setting,
measurement and reporting of program performance and financial
management.
At the time of enactment of the performance standards, the
District government was on the verge of financial collapse. A
June 22, 1994 GAO report found that the District of Columbia
faced cash problems and a long-term imbalance of revenues and
expenditures. The GAO report further found that the District
government had attempted to balance its books with short-term
actions that both exacerbate cash problems and postpone
financial solutions. To aid the District government in
addressing its financial problems and to encourage performance-
based government planning, Congress enacted legislation for
performance-based planning and reporting. The legislation was
based on the Federal Government Performance and Results Act of
1993.
By the close of fiscal year 1994, the District's financial
condition was so critical that Congress passed, and the
President signed into law, Public Law 104-8, the District of
Columbia Financial Responsibility and Management Assistance Act
of 1995 (the Act). The Act established the D.C. Financial
Responsibility and Management Assistance Authority (the
Authority) and the Office of Chief Financial Officer [OCFO] and
gave these offices oversight responsibility for the District's
budget.
Performance Accountability Reporting Requirements
The Reauthorization Act included a reporting schedule to
ensure accountability for program performance. Not later than
March 1 of each year, beginning in 1995, the Mayor was required
to develop and submit to Congress and the Comptroller General
of the GAO a performance accountability plan for all
significant activities of all departments, agencies and
programs of the District government for the subsequent fiscal
year.
Each plan was required to include performance goals that
were measurable and objective, for both the quantity and
quality of the activities, and to include measures of program
outcomes and results. The manager most responsible for
achieving each goal and that person's immediate supervisor were
to be identified. To measure the effectiveness of program
management, each significant activity was to have two goals:
one for an acceptable level of performance and one for a
superior level.
Not later than March 1 of each year, beginning in 1997, the
Mayor was required to develop and submit to Congress and the
Comptroller General a performance accountability report on
District government activities for the fiscal year ending on
the previous September 30. The report was required to include:
(1) for each stated goal of the submitted plan, a statement of
the actual level of performance achieved compared to the stated
goal for an acceptable level of performance and the goal for a
superior level of performance; (2) identification of the
manager and that person's immediate supervisor; and (3) a
statement of the status of any court orders for the District
government and steps taken towards compliance with the court
orders.
District Government Compliance with the Performance Accountability
Requirements
As of January 1, 1997, Congress had not received a
performance accountability plan from the District government.
On July 10, 1997, the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on the
District of Columbia held a hearing on the District's fiscal
year 1998 budget request. At the hearing, the Mayor was
questioned on the status of the District government's
performance accountability plan. Testimony established that the
Mayor had not complied with the law. Following the shift in
control of nine District agencies from the Mayor to the
Authority by the Management Reform Act of 1997, Congress
amended the law to require the Authority to prepare the report.
On March 2, the Authority submitted its ``Report On A
Comprehensive Performance Management System.'' This report
provided a conceptual framework for the District government's
Comprehensive Performance Management System. However, it lacked
the quantitative measures and time lines expected by Congress.
On September 30, 1998, Dr. Camille Barnett, the District's
Chief Management Officer [CMO], submitted the District's Fiscal
Year 1999 Performance Accountability Plan to Congress. In the
development of the plan, each agency worked to: (1) clarify its
mission; (2) describe key programs, projects and initiatives;
and (3) identify measures of services and functions deemed in
support of its commitment to its customers, the residents of
the District of Columbia. The plan stated that the most
significant challenges facing the District government were
those related to measuring performance in ways that are
reliable, valid and truly useful for management improvement.
In November 1998, the District elected a new Mayor, Anthony
A. Williams, and in January 1999, Dr. Barnett resigned as CMO.
On March 5, 1999, the District of Columbia Management
Restoration Act of 1999, Public Law 106-1, was enacted. The act
repealed the District of Columbia Management Reform Act of 1997
(Subtitle B of Title XI of the Balanced Budget Act of 1997,
Public Law 105-33), thus restoring to the Mayor management
authority for the daily operation of the District's nine
largest departments.
As the first step in the new administration's approach to
performance-based government, the Mayor announced a short-term
action agenda. Under this agenda, certain agencies embarked on
an aggressive effort to eliminate problems responsive to
immediate corrective action. On March 24, 1999, the Mayor
delivered to Congress a draft project plan for the Performance
Accountability Work Plan. The final work plan, entitled
``District of Columbia Management Report,'' was submitted to
Congress on June 1, 1999, as part of the District government's
consensus budget for fiscal year 2000.
District of Columbia Management Report
The District of Columbia Management Report establishes
baseline measures for performance-based management for results
in the District government. The report includes a range of
measures for all levels of government. The efforts of all
District agencies are framed by four strategic goals: (1)
improvement of government services; (2) an expanded economy;
(3) support for the District's children; and (4) a rebuilding
of the human services network. Agencies have now embarked on an
effort at long-term strategic planning, and agency directors
are currently developing performance measures, with a focus on
the agency's mission and organizational objectives.
Performance Measures and Performance Assessment
Performance measures are expected to help monitor and
improve the long-term strategic planning effort and to indicate
how well structural changes within an agency are improving the
quality and delivery of services to District residences. The
Mayor selected 17 agencies to develop outcome and customer
service measures. Thirteen of the targeted agencies provide
direct services to District residents and significantly impact
the quality of their lives on an ongoing basis. The remaining 4
agencies are relied upon by the direct service agencies to
support their daily operations. High impact agencies were
identified in the following six areas:
--Economic Development and Regulation.--Department of Housing
and Community Development; Department of Employment
Service; Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs.
--Public Safety and Justice.--Metropolitan Police Department;
Fire and Emergency Services Department; Department of
Corrections.
--Public Education Systems.--D.C. Public Schools; D.C. Public
Library.
--Public Works.--Department of Public Works; Department of
Motor Vehicles.
--Government Support.--Office of Personnel; Office of
Contracting and Procurement; Office of the Chief
Technology Officer; Office of Property Management.
In the fiscal year 2000 budget submission, these agencies
presented a mission statement, performance measures and target
dates. In addition, the Mayor and designated agencies have
entered into performance contracts that outline the agency's
mission, goals and measures and establish a time line for major
agency initiatives. The Office of the Mayor issues interim
reports to the general public to inform residents of the
government's efforts to measure customer service and
satisfaction. To verify results of the performance measurement
system, the Mayor's Director of Customer Service has formed a
task force to document agencies' data collection practices and
self-testing. Additionally, the District's independent Office
of the Inspector General will perform performance audits of
agency outcome measures to ensure an objective analysis.
The District assesses performance on 4 criteria: customer
perspective; financial accountability; internal business
processes; and learning and growth. Based on the District
government's own observations, agencies need to develop better
measures in the areas of financial accountability; learning and
growth; and employee training.
Analysis of District's Progress as a Performance Based Municipal
Government
Mayor Williams previously served as the District's Chief
Financial Officer [CFO] from 1995 until 1997. During his tenure
as CFO, Mr. Williams used results-based practices to bring the
District's budget into balance and, ultimately, generate a
surplus. Now, as Mayor, Mr. Williams has designed a framework
for performance measurement in the District of Columbia. The
task facing the new administration is twofold: (1) the
development of goals and measures for the various agencies; and
(2) holding District employees and managers accountable for the
achievement of those goals.
Successful implementation of a District-wide performance
management system will require a major paradigm shift among
District employees at all levels of responsibility, but
foremost by agency supervisors, who are responsible for
articulating the administration's goals and objectives. The
staff of the Office of the City Administrator, which has
responsibility for District government management policies,
recently articulated eleven recommendations for the development
and implementation of performance measures:
--Insure that all agency directors and CFO's are aware of the
requirements concerning performance plans.
--Clearly, consistently and frequently communicate the
vision.
--Separate the types of measures and define responsibility
for their development and tracking.
--Implement a comprehensive change management program.
--Align the change management and performance measurement
activities to the Mayor's strategic priorities.
--Appoint the Directors of Personnel and Collective
Bargaining and Labor Relations as co-champions for the
implementation.
--Define an aggressive implementation schedule, but initially
tie it to existing or soon to be started projects.
--Clearly define who develops and reviews measures.
--Allocate sufficient human and fiscal resources for bench
marking activities.
--Require high levels of data quality.
--Align information and personnel systems.
Analysis of Performance Measures
The District of Columbia Budget for fiscal year 2000
included performance measures for 17 agencies. The format for
the presentation of the agency measures is consistent and
included: (1) a statement of the agency's mission; (2) a list
of performance measures; (3) actual performance data for fiscal
year 1998; (4) target performance measures for fiscal year
1999; and (5) target performance measures for fiscal year 2000.
Generally, the mission statement for each agency is
straightforward, concise and agency-appropriate. Overall, the
performance measures for the various agencies are specific and
measurable. In some instances, however, an agency performance
measure is not clearly linked to the agency's stated mission.
For example, although the Department of Motor Vehicles stated
mission is to foster ``the safe operation of motor vehicles on
the District's streets in accordance with applicable laws and
regulations,'' none of the performance measures related to this
mission.
Implementation of performance accountability requirements
by the District government has been long-delayed, in part by
the major management changes in the District government during
the past 6 years. The initial efforts of the Mayor and his
administration indicate a commitment to performance
accountability. However, the Subcommittee expects improvements
in the District's adherence to the spirit of the
Reauthorization Act through the development of performance
measures and their clear linkage to the stated mission of
District agencies in fiscal year 2001. The District government
should more clearly articulate agency goals. Without clear
goals, the District and Congress cannot assess the success of
agencies in achieving performance-based governance.
Likewise, the Subcommittee expects the District government
to more fully comply with the letter of the law. Specifically,
the District has not provided performance accountability plans
for all departments, agencies and programs of the District
government. In fact, the Subcommittee has received the required
plans for only 18 agencies. Additionally, the District has
failed to identify all managers and that person's immediate
supervisor. Finally, the Reauthorization Act requires the
District government to provide a comprehensive report on all
District activities subject to court order, including the
requirements of the court order. To date, the District has
failed to provide Congress with this information, even though
court orders and receiverships cost the District government
millions of dollars each year.
SUBCOMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND WATER DEVELOPMENT
DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
i. performance goals and measures
The Results Act requires agencies to develop tri-annual
strategic plans, annual performance plans, and annually report
results beginning with the fiscal year 1999 budget cycle. The
Department of Energy [DOE] has met all three of those
requirements. The Department's performance of those
requirements has been evaluated by both GAO and the
Subcommittee. While a tri-annual strategic plan, an annual
performance plan, and an annual report are the legislated
requirements of the Results Act, they are not the Act's
objective. The Results Act's objectives are to shift the focus
of government agencies from a preoccupation with actions
taken--such as grants dispensed or inspections made--to a focus
on the results of those activities, such as real gains in
employability, safety, responsiveness, or program quality.
A review of the implementation of the Results Act,
conducted in accordance with the spirit of the Act, asks a
single question, ``Is the Department of Energy achieving
desirable results?'' The answer to that question varies
tremendously across the Department.
DOE historically has a poor record for completing large
projects. From 1980 through 1996, the Department terminated 31
of 80 major system acquisitions (mission-critical projects
costing over $100 million) after expenditures of over $10
billion, and completed only 15 of the 80, most of which were
behind schedule and over budget. For example, DOE spent $6.5
billion over 15 years for a permanent disposal facility for
spent nuclear fuel at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. The project,
which was supposed to open in 1998, is currently 12 years
behind schedule. In recent years, the Department has recognized
its project management weaknesses and sought to improve. The
DOE, which contracts for over 90 percent of its work, has had
problems managing those contracts and overseeing the technical
aspects of its contracts. For example, DOE routinely turns to
contractors to review proposals and work performed by other
contractors. The result is that, within the closely knit
contractor community in which contractors frequently
subcontract with one another (sometimes through many layers on
a single task), it is not clear that the Government's interests
prevail over those of the contractors.
DOE's management structure does not effectively solve
agency problems. The Department continues to exacerbate this
weakness by adding layers of management onto the Department in
response to specific issues, such as the creation of security
and counter-intelligence ``czars'' in response to recent
allegations of espionage. In a report mandated by this
Subcommittee, the Institute for Defense Analysis found that:
``Many DOE and contractor-officials describe Defense
Programs oversight as creating an inverted management
pyramid, because the number of reviewers exceeds the
number of hands-on workers. For example, contractors
have cited examples where work done by two or three
people becomes the subject of review meetings involving
40 or more Defense Programs officials.''
That example cites only the problem internal to Defense
Programs. The problem expands when reviewers from other
oversight functions are included. The Department has programs
within one office, complying with policies set by a second
office, in accordance with procedures set by a third office,
verified by a fourth office. This myriad of oversight and
review does not improve performance. To the contrary, in some
cases it diminishes performance. As overseers have multiplied,
the line between oversight and responsibility has been blurred
and sometimes disappears. The frequent result is that, when
mistakes are made, all parties contend they are overseers, and
no one takes responsibility.
Successive Secretaries have sought to address this issue
and have had limited success. An earlier review chaired by Bob
Galvin, the Chairman of Motorola, found that:
``There have been many studies of the Department of
Energy laboratories. As one reads these reports, one
recognizes that the items which were recommended in
previous reports are for the most part recommended in
most subsequent reports. As each past study has taken
place, people of good intention make sincere efforts to
`fine tune' the system. However, the Department and the
Congress should recognize that there has been little
fundamental improvement as a function of past studies *
* *.''
While DOE has had problems fulfilling many of its
objectives, it has successfully met others. For example, 3
years ago, the programs of the Department's Office of Energy
Efficiency and Renewable Energy were inappropriately dominated
by the interests of non-governmental organizations, and there
was little or no coordination in the development of various
renewable energy technologies. The current Assistant Secretary
has effectively returned decision making and priority setting
to the cognizant Federal officials, has greatly reduced the
``stove-pipes'' that allowed different renewable energy
technologies to proceed without consideration to their relative
merits, and has implemented a merit-based procurement process.
The Office of Defense Programs [ODP] has taken its broad
responsibility to maintain the Nation's nuclear weapons
stockpile through science and developed detailed tasks and
schedules for each weapons system through the ``Green Book''
process. The ``Green Book'' is suitable as a detailed
performance plan for ODP. Unfortunately, ODP's ability to meet
the schedules of the ``Green Book'' is in question. While part
of the problem is due to issues internal to Defense Programs,
because of the Department's ``matrix'' management structure,
issues outside of ODP have previously contributed to problems
within ODP. Legislation has been enacted to create a semi-
autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration within DOE
to manage its national security functions in an effort to
address this issue.
The Department's problems in ``achieving desirable
results'' exist in part because a number of the Department's
missions are controversial and among the most difficult tasks
the Government has before it. For example, the Department is
struggling within its Environmental Quality programs to comply
with myriad environmental laws and regulations developed prior
to their application to departmental facilities. In many cases,
waste streams from departmental facilities contain material or
combinations of material not found in the private sector, for
which the respective laws and regulations require contradictory
remedies. Due to the unforeseen application of these laws to
departmental sites, DOE has been forced to enter into
compliance agreements with States and Federal regulators that
include milestones the Department knows it will be unable to
meet and milestones that must be met using unproven or even
unknown technologies.
ii. consultations
The Department has assigned responsibility for compliance
with the Results Act to the Office of the Chief Financial
Officer [OCFO]. In recent years, OCFO, with the support of the
Subcommittee, has substantially expanded its financial and
program management capability. However, OCFO has less technical
ability to oversee contracts than the program offices and has
no greater ability to address management and other issues
within DOE.
The Department's annual performance plan has improved
substantially since its inception, when the Subcommittee found
``considerable inconsistency among the quality of information
provided by the program offices,'' and that many of the goals
provided ``no basis for the evaluation of performance, and, as
a result, in no way assist in the purposes of the Government
Performance and Results Act.'' The annual performance plan for
fiscal year 2000 clearly details goals for the coming year as
components of the goals included in the tri-annual strategic
plan.
The refinement of the annual performance plan reflects the
full and frank relationship between the Subcommittee and the
OCFO. Communications on the plan's development have aided the
Department in responding to the desire of the Subcommittee with
regard to the plan and have kept the Subcommittee apprised of
issues as goals have changed due to unforeseen circumstances.
iii. usefulness
It is the Subcommittee staff's view that the Results Act
provides a useful tool for evaluating agency goals and
measuring progress. Today, DOE is generally confounded by a
management maze, irreconcilable regulatory requirements, and
insufficient skills in critical areas necessary to solve its
own dilemmas. In such an environment, the usefulness of the
Results Act is limited.
SUBCOMMITTEE ON FOREIGN OPERATIONS, EXPORT FINANCING, AND RELATED
PROGRAMS
i. performance goals and measures
In 1997, the United States Agency for International
Development [USAID] created an Agency Strategic Plan which
presented six strategic goals in development and humanitarian
assistance and one management goal as the basis for measuring
the effectiveness of its programs. These 6 development and
humanitarian assistance goals are to: (1) encourage broad-based
economic growth and agricultural development; (2) strengthen
democracy and good governance; (3) build human capacity through
education and training; (4) stabilize and protect world
population and human health; (5) protect the world's
environment for long-term sustained ability; and (6) increase
the numbers of lives saved, reduce suffering associated with
natural or man-made disasters, and reestablish conditions
necessary for political and/or economic development. The
management goal is that USAID remain a premier bilateral
development agency.
The Fiscal Year 2000 Annual Performance Plan uses the goals
described in the Strategic Plan to provide details as to how
USAID will achieve its quantitative development goals and
indicators that will be used for the coming year.
USAID's measures are results oriented and are not based on
the number of activities such as grants awarded or persons
trained. However, the goals are too ambiguous to lend
themselves to credible evaluations of success or measurement of
benchmarks toward that success. USAID needs to develop regional
performance plans tailored to local requirements that spell out
expectations for performance as well as 5 year trends.
Though subject to past criticism for its methods of
assessment, USAID continues to rely on country level statistics
obtained from secondary sources, mostly international
institutions such as the World Bank, the United Nations and the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development for its
data. In responding to Subcommittee inquiries, USAID stated:
``USAID is largely dependent upon secondary data
generated at the country level. It is difficult for
USAID program staff to evaluate the reliability of all
of the data in their annual performance reports.
Primary data collection (e.g. through surveys) is
costly and usually occurs on a bi-annual basis or less
frequently. Thus data reporting generally lags by at
least 2 years. USAID's Performance Plan reporting is
based on `projected actuals' which are derived by using
trend lines. USAID is continuously assessing the costs
of data collection versus the benefits of alternative
uses for these funds.''
USAID noted that it continues to consult with other U.S.
Government foreign affairs agencies within the framework of the
International Affairs Strategic Plan. At the start of this
interchange in 1998, coordination on sustainable development
issues was considered by USAID as low to medium. USAID stated
that they expect this level to improve to medium to high by the
end of the 1999 fiscal year.
The Subcommittee continues to urge USAID and the State
Department, as the principal agents for the U.S. Government in
international affairs, to work together to ensure that they are
coordinating policy and program efforts. The Subcommittee
understands that consultations have been ongoing between the
department and the agency, and the Subcommittee encourages the
rapid creation of a quantitative mechanism to ensure that these
tools are in place.
Many U.S. Government departments and agencies are involved
in international programs that can be related to USAID's goals
and objectives. For example, the GAO noted that in fiscal year
1998, Congress authorized the Department of Defense to provide
about $50 million in overseas humanitarian, disaster and civic
aid.
In addition to the State Department, the Subcommittee also
has oversight over some of the programs which exist in the
following agencies which do not coordinate their efforts on a
regular basis with USAID: Department of Commerce; Department of
Energy; Department of Treasury through the African Development
Bank and Fund, the European Bank for Reconstruction and
Development, the Asian Development Bank, the International Bank
for Reconstruction and Development, the International
Development Association and the International Monetary Fund;
the African Development Foundation; the Inter-American
Foundation; and the Peace Corps.
ii. data reliability
USAID does not have the resources or capacity to be the
sole source of information for its agency data. In its Fiscal
Year 2000 Annual Performance Plan, USAID cites the use of
statistics from World Bank, United Nations and other
international organizations for the data for future reports.
USAID acknowledges the concerns expressed by those within
the Agency, at OMB and from Capitol Hill about the reliance on
external sources for validation of their programs. USAID states
in its plan that it will continue to work to identify
performance goals and indicators that better measure annual
performance levels.
The Subcommittee appreciates the long term aspects of
USAID's programs and its limited ability to obtain statistics
for assessment of benchmarks for its programs, especially in
the areas of humanitarian assistance, democracy and governance,
and environmental programs. The Subcommittee hopes to work with
USAID to create the tools for assessing its goals.
iii. high risk problems
The GAO identified the following specific areas of concern
for USAID:
--(A) USAID has not implemented a comprehensive information
management system; and
--(B) USAID's financial management information is unreliable.
GAO noted that ``while an acknowledgement of a major
management challenge is a good first step, there is concern
about the absence or vagueness for goals in certain areas.
Without specific and measurable performance goals, it is
difficult, if not impossible to assess progress in addressing
problems and to hold agencies accountable.''
USAID provided the Subcommittee with an update of the
status of the high risk problems. The following is a summary of
USAID's assessment:
(A) New Management System.--USAID is still working to
implement a New Management System [NMS]. In 1994, NMS was
designed as a custom built set of modules which were to provide
enhanced program management capabilities. Unfortunately, in
USAID's own words, ``NMS failed to perform as planned because
of communication, technological and management problems.''
NMS will be implemented over the next 3 fiscal years and
will support accounting, procurement, budgeting and program
operating functions. The Subcommittee will continue to closely
monitor the Agency's progress and its attempts to complete
renovation and implementation of the system as projected in
fiscal year 2000.
(B) Financial Management.--USAID's vulnerabilities in
financial management were addressed in the Fiscal Year 1999
Annual Performance Plan. USAID's Office of Financial Management
has created a strategic plan to move USAID, in their words, to
``a more responsive, effective, collaborative, and customer-
oriented financial management system.''
GAO noted in its review of the Annual Performance Plan that
``USAID's effort to correct design and implement problems with
its financial and management system reflected consistence
between their strategies and goals.''
iv. consultations
USAID staff did not consult with the Subcommittee on its
performance plan. USAID states that ``the traditional budget
structure does not link resources to performance goals. The
Agency does a `cross walk' where it assigns resources from all
of the Agency's program budget accounts to specific goals.''
USAID has been criticized for its inability to provide a
stronger link between performance goals and budgetary
priorities.
v. usefulness
USAID went through each of its goals and described the
methods USAID would use to assess achievement of its
performance goals. The Annual Performance Plan varied in its
assessment of USAID's ability to reach its goals; at times the
reader felt that the determination was more optimistic than
realistic. The Subcommittee looks forward to the Fiscal Year
2000 Performance Report to fully analyze USAID's ability to
make and achieve its goals.
By its own admission, there is a decline between funding
assessments and performance by USAID. The Agency has a three
tiered system of performance assessment and budgetary priority:
the individual units of operation, the field mission and
finally, Washington headquarters. The individual units and
field missions continually monitor performance of each of their
programs. Washington also monitors performance and holds formal
reviews of bureau-wide performances in conjunction with
budgetary requests.
USAID takes performance and goals and budgetary
capabilities into consideration at annual budget reviews. With
each of these tiers, though, priorities can be altered from
initial performance assessments, and normally the rating
declines in ranking. GAO noted that USAID should also develop a
clear linkage between broad development goals and specific
USAID country program goal results.
The Fiscal Year 2000 Annual Performance Plan provided the
Subcommittee with an impression of how USAID will attain their
goals within the next year. The Subcommittee will find it
difficult to assess USAID's specific contribution to enhancing
global sustainable development programs while relying on
secondary sources or dated information as its primary tools for
analysis.
The Subcommittee urges USAID to formulate a more detailed
approach in the creation of its Annual Performance Plan. USAID
should develop regional performance plans tailored to local
requirements that spell out expectations for performance as
well as five year trends.
SUBCOMMITTEE ON INTERIOR AND RELATED AGENCIES
DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR
i. performance goals and measures
The various bureaus within the Department of the Interior
[DOI] have generally taken steps to focus their goals and
performance measures on the most important objectives. For
example, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reduced its annual
performance goals from 45 to 15, and the Bureau of Land
Management reduced the number of its annual performance goals
from 61 to 46. The U.S. Geological Survey now has two broad
annual performance goals and ten quantitative performance
measures that cover all program activities relative to the
agency's mission. This streamlining has had an effect of
tightening the performance plans and making them more
understandable. It remains to be seen, however, whether the
aggregation or merging of performance goals will lead to a
lessened sense of accountability or accomplishment, and, in
turn, reduced performance on the part of programs within the
agency that are now only part of a broader, more generic
performance goal. It is critical that there be awareness at the
field station level of the broader agency goals as well as the
specific contribution of each field station to the furtherance
of these goals.
In general, the DOI bureaus have been successful in
developing relevant, outcome oriented goals. The performance
plans of various agencies such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service still contain output-related measures, but the
occurrence of such measures has diminished.
The majority of goals and measures established in the
performance plans of DOI bureaus appear to be realistic and
reasonably challenging based on available data. In many cases,
however, it remains difficult to evaluate whether agency goals
and measures are appropriate due to the limited baseline data
available for many programs and activities. Some of the agency
goals reveal planning problems. For example, a part of one of
the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service goals states, ``80 percent
of the contaminated cleanup projects will be completed
according to their original schedule''. If a goal is only to
meet a certain percentage of an originally scheduled plan, then
it is very possible that the original planning/scheduling
targets were unreasonable.
Given that the accuracy and reliability of performance data
are critical to the successful evaluation of agency
performance, DOI bureaus have not made sufficient progress in
describing data verification and validation processes as part
of their performance plans. While some improvements have been
made, many bureau plans do not sufficiently identify data
limitations or data system requirements and how such
limitations or systems availability would impact performance
measures. To demonstrate to the Subcommittee that bureau or
program level performance is not being ``gamed,'' the
Department must make further efforts to ensure the accuracy,
consistency and reliability of performance data, and to convey
this information in its performance plans. It should be noted,
however, that data collection bearing on performance
measurement is not without cost. The Subcommittee recognizes
that additional resources have been sought by a number of
bureaus in fiscal year 2000 to initiate or enhance performance-
related data collection, and that the Subcommittee has not been
able to provide these additional resources in all cases. The
Subcommittee will continue to work with the bureaus to
prioritize data collection needs and make data collection more
efficient and less expensive where possible.
The performance goals of each agency appear to be broadly
representative and balanced in the treatment of competing
demands within each agency, and appear to reflect the statutory
missions of the various agencies.
The DOI bureaus' fiscal year 2000 performance plans provide
somewhat improved treatment of cross-cutting initiatives,
particularly with respect to intra-agency cross-program
initiatives. The Department's plan as a whole does not,
however, attempt to reexamine the fundamental organization and
functions of the natural resource agencies as the GAO has
suggested is warranted as part of performance planning. Neither
do the plans tend to contain sufficient substantive discussion
of inter-bureau or inter-departmental work in pursuit of common
goals. While the Department's performance plan does identify
and discuss four specific crosscutting efforts, it does not
attempt to address the much broader array of programmatic areas
in which the DOI bureaus and/or other Departments would seem to
have common goals and performance measurement requirements.
The Forest Service is currently undergoing public review of
its draft revised GPRA strategic plan which is scheduled for
completion in September 2000. The new draft plan focuses more
on outcomes or results which are absent from its current plan.
Due to this omission, the current plan does not enable the
agency to objectively evaluate annual accomplishments and link
them to its strategic plan. For fiscal year 2001 and beyond,
the agency plans to provide this link in large part through
proposed new performance measures which are included within the
framework of a new streamlined budget structure. Each of the
performance measures within the annual budget is linked to
specific goals and objectives contained in the strategic plan.
The Subcommittee is reviewing with great concern the
agency's proposed new budget structure and related performance
measures. Given the longstanding difficulties with the agency's
fiscal accountability, drastically reducing the number of the
agency's line items in order to provide ``big bucket''
financing of its programs could lead to less accountability
rather than more. The performance measures which the agency
claims will provide accountability are new, and little
historical data is available to assess how the agency's current
performance based on these measures compares to previous years.
Moreover, many of the performance measures do not appear to be
performance measures so much as workload measures. That is,
they only indicate what the agency will do with appropriated
dollars, not how well they will do it. The Subcommittee expects
to have a lengthy dialogue with the Forest Service on the use
of performance measures in its budget and for use in assessing
the achievement of GPRA strategic plan goals and objectives.
ii. data reliability
The DOI's fiscal year 2000 annual performance plan provides
a standard format for identifying data collection methodology
and sources, as well as validation of this data among the
different bureaus. While this format provided a valuable
overview of the different systems being developed or currently
in use by the department to provide and ensure credible
performance-related data, it was relatively broad and non-
specific in its treatment of the systems.
The Subcommittee is nevertheless aware that the Department
and several individual bureaus are attempting in several
instances to upgrade or modify information systems in order to
better support their performance plans. Collection of specific
performance data and the information systems required to manage
such data may often require additional resources. The
Subcommittee will continue to work with the bureaus to
prioritize information system needs necessary to produce
credible performance reports, but is mindful that the
usefulness of a data set or information system often does not
correlate to its size, complexity, or expense.
The DOI performance plans do not address in great detail
the weaknesses or limitations of the performance data that is
being collected, though the plans of the Bureau of Land
Management and the Fish and Wildlife Service have improved in
this regard.
The Forest Service has proposed a multitude of new
performance measures as part of its fiscal year 2001 budget.
These measures are linked to the agency's revised GPRA
strategic plan goals and objectives. Since these measures are
new, it is unclear whether the data necessary to determine
these measures is unreliable. However, the agency has
recognized problems with data collection and reliability in a
number of areas which would appear to call into question
performance measures based on such information. For example,
some performance indicators related to programs under the
National Forest System appropriation will rely on data
collected through the agency's Management Attainment Reporting
[MAR] system. Current checks are not in place to ensure that
this data is complete, accurate and consistent with other data
sources. Another significant problem with data collection in
the agency has been the interpretation of definitions used for
individual data elements, such as ``deferred maintenance.'' The
agency needs to do a better job of ensuring that definitions
are consistently applied and interpreted across all regions and
levels of the agency.
iii. high risk problems
In January 1999, GAO published a report identifying high-
risk problems in Federal agencies. GAO identified as a high-
risk management problem DOI's management of the $3 billion
Indian trust fund, which has long been characterized by
inadequate accounting and information systems, untrained and
inexperienced staff, poor record keeping and internal controls,
and inadequate written policies and procedures. The Office of
the Special Trustee was created specifically to ensure that the
Department establishes appropriate policies and procedures,
develops necessary systems, and takes affirmative action to
reform the management of Indian trust funds. Thus, each of the
agency's performance goals addresses the problem highlighted by
GAO.
GAO identified as an additional high-risk management
problem DOI's distribution of about $800 million each year in
Tribal Priority Allocations [TPA] in a manner which does not
take into consideration the tribes' changing needs, the tribes'
own revenues, or the funds necessary to fund fully the tribal
programs. The Bureau of Indian Affairs' [BIA] performance goals
do not address the problem highlighted by GAO. Indeed, BIA
recently provided a report to the Congress on TPA in which it
explicitly rejected any consideration of tribal revenues and
any redistribution of TPA ``base'' funds in response to
changing needs. This continues to be a matter of great concern
to the Subcommittee as a matter of both GPRA planning and
fundamental fairness.
The Forest Service has had persistent problems with respect
to its financial systems. The agency's financial statements
have been subject to annual audit by the USDA Inspector General
and GAO since fiscal year 1991. However, the agency has yet to
receive a clean audit opinion, despite repeated promises to
improve its performance. GAO added the Forest Service to its
list of agencies at ``high risk'' of waste, fraud, abuse and
mismanagement due to the unreliability of the agency's
financial statements. The Forest Service has implemented a new
accounting system designed to cure these problems. In addition,
the agency also believes that its proposed new budget structure
and performance measures will help ameliorate its fiscal
accountability problems. Even if true, it is unlikely that the
agency can obtain a clean opinion for several years. The
Subcommittee remains very concerned about financial management
and accountability at the Forest Service.
iv. consultations
The Department and its individual bureaus have generally
been forthright and timely in their consultations with the
Subcommittee on performance plans.
The Department of Energy programs within the Subcommittee's
jurisdiction have done a less thorough job of consultation.
Consultations with the Department have in some instances
resulted in changes in specific performance goals or
measurements, but have been primarily useful in providing a
forum in which to convey to the Department ways in which the
performance plans can be made more understandable and more
useful to the Subcommittee.
All agencies must do a better job of continuing
consultations with the Subcommittee regarding changes in goals,
performance plan structure and performance measurements. The
agencies must also do a better job of discussing annual budget
requests in relation to individual performance plans.
The Department has a planning office that is separate from
the Office of Budget, but both report to the Deputy Assistant
Secretary for Budget and Finance. This is also the typical
design for DOI bureaus (i.e. separate offices reporting to the
same higher authority), although the BIA has planning and
budget staff in the same office, and Geological Survey has at
least one person in the budget office who works on GPRA issues.
The existence of two separate offices has at times impeded
effective cooperation and consultation in the development of
GPRA plans. In a number of cases, information contained in
fiscal year 2000 budget documents does not match information
contained in performance plans. The National Park Service is
one example. The Department is encouraged to emphasize closer
working relationships between budget and planning offices.
The Forest Service has attempted to actively consult with
the Subcommittee concerning its proposed budget structure
changes and related performance measures. However, despite the
Subcommittee's request to have this information provided well
before the fiscal year 2001 budget submittal, the agency was
unable to do so. This delay will hamper the Subcommittee's
ability to fully consider these proposed changes and to work
with the agency on how improvements could be made in this
regard. Timely responses to the Subcommittee's requests will
better facilitate the achievement of GPRA goals in the future.
v. usefulness
While the Department's bureau sub-plans make for a lengthy
annual performance plan, most of the individual bureau plans
have made significant improvements in terms of user-
friendliness. The Department has developed a relatively
consistent format for each of the bureau plans and has
streamlined the plans so that there are fewer, more focused
goals and measures. In most cases, one need not read the
individual performance plans in conjunction with the budgets,
as there has been an attempt to link the performance plans to
budgetary information. In some cases there are inconsistencies
with the agency budget and the performance plans.
The DOI bureaus have generally tried to link funding
resources to performance goals. The component plans, however,
did not always clearly relate the program activities in the
President's budget to performance goals. For example, it was
not always clear how the funding for budget program activities
would be allocated to performance goals in the plans of BIA,
the Bureau of Land Management and the Fish and Wildlife
Service. The U.S. Geological Survey, on the other hand, was
relatively successful in showing the relationship between
performance goals and budget activities. For the performance
plans to be truly useful to the Subcommittee in evaluating
agency budget requests, this linkage must be more clearly and
carefully established across all Department bureaus.
The Department of Energy programs under the Subcommittee's
jurisdiction have fallen short in linking performance goals to
budget activities. While the Department has shown some
improvement by more consistently stating the reasons for annual
increases or decreases requested for particular budget
activities, the relationship between these budgetary changes
and annual performance goals is not clearly established. The
budget justification is replete with statistics on energy
savings, emissions reductions and other performance measures
for specific programs, but there is little or no discussion of
whether the budget requests for these programs are driven or
influenced by these measures. In short, it is difficult to tell
whether the Department is directing resources to the programs
that get the ``biggest bang for the buck,'' or, if not, why
not.
Given the general lack of baseline data for many
performance measures and the still shaky linkage between most
agency performance plans and budget documents, the performance
plans are generally not yet useful for making funding
decisions. There are exceptions, however, and most of the plans
demonstrate potential to become valuable decision-making tools
once reliable baseline data is developed and once clearer
relationships are established to agency budgets.
Any improvements to the plan that allow the Subcommittee to
focus on the most critical issues in the plan would be
valuable. The Subcommittee will benefit from the streamlined
performance goals that many agencies adopted, as well as the
consistent format that was developed to make the plans more
user-friendly. While there is the benefit of more focused,
streamlined information in the plan, it is only useful if there
is an underlying dedication to ensuring the accuracy of the
data from the field to the regional and national offices. The
credibility of the performance plans over time will further be
measured by the openness of the agencies in assessing the
strengths and weaknesses of their respective plans (e.g. data
measurement, validation, choice of goals, etc.), and providing
that information to the Subcommittee. These documents are not
solely intended to be a mechanism for justifying budgetary
increases, but rather to provide an accurate picture of agency
performance that will serve as the guide for future direction.
SUBCOMMITTEE ON LABOR, HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES, AND EDUCATION, AND
RELATED AGENCIES
DEPARTMENT OF LABOR
i. performance goals and measures
The goals and measures of the Department of Labor [DOL] are
focused on important objectives of its programs and activities
and cover key aspects of performance. In general, the
performance goals are comprehensive and explicitly cover all
program activities in the Department's budget, as required
under the Results Act and related guidance.
The Department's plan includes several goals and measures
that are expressed as outcomes as well as several measures that
are expressed as processes or activities. In several instances,
the Department has developed outcome goals where it is logical
to do so. Also, its fiscal year 2000 performance plan is an
improvement over its 1999 plan in that some prior goals were
modified to better focus on outcomes. While some of the
Department's goals and measures are focused on processes or
activities, the use of such goals and measures is not
necessarily inappropriate. One such goal, for example, is
meeting or exceeding standards for promptness in paying worker
claims for unemployment insurance and deciding appeals.
The levels of performance DOL seeks to attain, as reflected
in its plan, are understandable in light of, among other
things, what is known about past program performance. However,
it is difficult to judge how challenging all of the goals and
measures are without past performance information for each
goal. The first agency annual performance reports (based on
their fiscal year 1999 performance plans) are due this spring.
As agencies begin reporting on the actual levels of performance
they have achieved, determining how challenging performance
goals are will become easier. Another complicating factor is
that DOL lacks baseline data against which to measure some
goals.
In general, the Department's performance goals are
objective, measurable, and quantifiable. While baseline data
are shown for most indicators that can be used to compare past
performance with projected performance, baseline data have not
been established for several performance goals. For example,
one performance goal is to increase by 2 percent over fiscal
year 1999 the percent of those leaving the Trade Adjustment
Assistance and the North American Free Trade Agreement-Trade
Adjustment Assistance programs that: (1) get a job immediately;
and (2) still have jobs 13 weeks later. The plan notes,
however, that a 1999 baseline will be established when a new
reporting system under development provides data on
performance. Another problem is that some goals and measures
are based on old data and thus do not depict current
conditions. For example, one performance goal is to reduce
three of the most prevalent workplace injuries and causes of
illnesses by 7 percent from baseline levels in selected
industries and occupations. However, the baseline data for
assessing workplace injuries are over 4 years old, raising
concerns that some of the Department's performance measures may
not provide timely assessments of performance.
One of the improvements in the Department's fiscal year
2000 plan over its 1999 plan is the elimination of some
performance goals that were of limited value or questionable
validity because they did not sufficiently measure performance
and/or could lead to unintended consequences. In the 1999 plan,
for example, DOL presented performance goals that used the
number of complaints received as indicators of compliance with
worker protection and civil rights laws. Such measures could
have the unintended consequence of encouraging management to
discourage the filing of otherwise meritorious complaints. In
the fiscal year 2000 plan, DOL eliminated such measures.
Although the Department's goals discuss efforts to work
with other Federal agencies, the plan does not identify
specific actions DOL will take to ensure effective interaction
with other Federal agencies. Specifically, the plan does not
identify common or complementary performance goals and measures
elsewhere in the Federal government that relate to the
Department's goals and measures. For example, although two
performance goals relate to helping veterans find jobs, no
mention is made of how DOL will work with other Federal
agencies, such as the Department of Veterans Affairs. In
addition, to assist youth in making the transition from school
to work, DOL stated in its plan that, working with the
Department of Education [DOE], it will continue to expand
school-to-work activities and will build partnerships at the
State and local levels that include employers, organized labor,
community leaders, educators, and parents. However, the plan
provides no information specifying what is being done with DOE
to jointly achieve these goals and how all these partnerships
will help DOL achieve its goal of engaging youth in school-to-
work activities.
While mission fragmentation and program overlap are
relatively straightforward to identify, determining whether
overlapping programs are actually duplicative requires a much
more in-depth analysis of program goals, the means to achieve
them, and the targeted recipients. While this task is
difficult, DOL could use its Results Act plans as a mechanism
to address such challenges. But, as noted above, the
Department's fiscal year 2000 plan does not adequately describe
how it will actively work with other agencies to ensure that
the Department's goals are achieved. This is a challenge for
DOL, especially in light of the Department's decentralized
structure and the numerous Federal, State, and local partners
that share responsibility for its programs. For example, not
only does DOL itself have 22 offices, many with overlapping
responsibilities, but for many of its programs, such as job
training, enforcement of workplace standards, and collection of
economic and workforce statistics, DOL must work with State and
local governments or nongovernmental organizations that often
manage the Department's programs on a day-to-day basis. The
1996 welfare reform legislation and the Department's welfare-
to-work grant program created in 1997, combined with the
passage of the Workforce Investment Act in 1998, have affected
the nation's job training system in ways that are now just
beginning to become apparent. The developments require DOL to
re-evaluate its approach and reach out more effectively to
other departments, especially the Department of Health and
Human Services.
ii. data reliability
The Department lacks adequate information to assess whether
many of its programs are operating efficiently and are
producing intended results. In its plan, DOL recognizes that it
faces challenges in overcoming three performance measurement
issues: (1) lack of data, (2) insufficient data, and (3)
untimely reporting. The Department further notes that data are
missing in some areas and that data integrity is an issue in
other areas where existing measures are insufficiently precise
or are unreliable. These problems raise concerns about the
Department's ability to accurately measure the extent to which
performance goals are achieved. The Department identifies some
activities planned to address the quality of its data. It will,
for example, develop a departmentwide information technology
architecture as well as departmentwide data standards to
facilitate the efficient collection of timely and reliable
program data by the DOL components. However, DOL does not
provide enough specific information on the details of its
efforts to provide readers a clear understanding of how or when
such efforts will improve the quality of its performance
information.
While DOL identifies data system shortcomings in one
section of its plan, it states in another section that these
same data systems are reliable. Overall, the Department's plan
does not adequately describe how the lack of complete, timely,
and reliable data may affect its ability to assess its
performance goals. For example, DOL notes that GAO and the
Office of Inspector General have raised concerns about Job
Corps data, but there is no discussion of how these concerns
affect the measurement of the performance goal related to the
Job Corps program. While the plan discusses some strategies for
overcoming data weaknesses and limitations, the plan does not
provide sufficient information on how or when these limitations
will be overcome.
iii. consultation
The Department did conduct a series of formal consultations
with the House and the Senate Subcommittees on its current
strategic plan.
iv. usefulness
The Department's plan is fairly well organized and in many
cases effectively uses graphics to inform the reader. In its
plan, DOL presents 42 performance goals and 122 means and
strategies with which to achieve its goals. This number of
goals and strategies strikes a balance between presenting so
few as not to provide a comprehensive picture of agencywide
performance and presenting so many that a reader is
overwhelmed. In some instances, the means and strategies
presented do not identify how they would help achieve the
stated goal. For example, one performance goal states that 60
percent of local employment and training offices will be part
of one-stop career center systems. In a related strategy, DOL
states that it will ``continue its support of the adoption and
implementation of continuous improvement initiatives throughout
the workforce development system,'' but does not indicate how
these efforts will help achieve the one-stop career center
performance goal.
In general, the Department's performance plan clearly
aligns the agency's annual performance goals and its current
strategic goals. To establish the connection between annual and
longer-term strategic goals, DOL links multiple annual goals to
intermediate goals, referred to as ``outcome goals'' in the
plan. These intermediate goals describe the anticipated results
of the agency's programs and activities relative to the
strategic goals. Each strategic goal is linked to multiple
intermediate goals. The plan also incorporates an appendix that
shows the relationship among all of the Department's program
and budget activities and its strategic goals.
The Department's plan provides a generally clear picture of
intended performance across the agency and provides a general
discussion of strategies and resources the agency will use to
achieve its goals. In general, the performance goals and
measures are objective, clear, and measurable. In these
respects, the plan is a useful document.
The Department could improve its plan by showing how
specific program activities and their funding relate to more
discrete sets of performance goals. For example, the plan
explicitly describes incremental funding requests for new
initiatives by strategic goal, but broadly aggregates the
Department's total budget across the three strategic goals. In
addition, DOL needs to improve the quality of data being used
to measure performance and state in its plan when it will do
so. The Department could also improve its plan by better
explaining how its stated strategies will help DOL achieve
individual performance goals.
DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES
background on the hhs fiscal year 2000 performance plan
The Health and Human Services [HHS] Fiscal Year 2000 Annual
Performance Plan, which was submitted to the Congress as a
component of the Justification of Estimates of the President's
Fiscal Year 2000 Budget, consists of several documents: the HHS
Fiscal Year 2000 Performance Plan Summary and the HHS Operating
Division performance plans, which are incorporated directly
into the fiscal year 2000 budget documents. A description of
the information contained in these documents follows:
--The Performance Plan Summary provides the overall
Departmental context for the plans, demonstrates how
HHS' performance goals and measures support the HHS
strategic plan, and addresses performance measurement
challenges for HHS.
--The Operating Division annual performance plans include
performance goals and measures for all of HHS' program
activities and provide the linkage to the budget that
is critical to the GPRA requirements for annual
performance plans.
i. performance goals and measures
As required by the Results Act, HHS has established a
strategic plan that identifies the critical and fundamental
long-term performance objectives that HHS seeks to achieve with
funds appropriated for HHS and its programs. In turn, the HHS
operating divisions establish annual goals and targets for
their program activities that are consistent with the program's
budget request, the legislative intent of the program and the
relevant long-term goals set out in the strategic plan. In this
way, the goals and measures established by the Operating
Divisions are not only focused on the objectives of the program
activity, but also on the long-term goals the Department hopes
to achieve.
For the most part, the Department's goals are results-
oriented. Throughout its agencies and programs, HHS has defined
a balance of outcome, output and process measures in its
performance plan. While HHS seeks to measure its results with
measures of program outcomes as a matter of routine, in some
cases it is not able to include these because of the lack of
data to measure performance, or because of the need to work
with performance partners (such as States) to develop mutually
agreed upon outcomes. When using capacity and process measures,
HHS programs have provided clear linkage between the
achievement of these measures and longer-term outcome
objectives as appropriate.
HHS has set goals and measures that are consistent with the
legislative intent of its programs and of the Results Act, as
well as with the long-term outcomes the agency hopes to
achieve. HHS has attempted to set goals and targets that are
challenging, but could realistically be met.
Reliability of data was a key criterion in the selection of
performance goals for the HHS fiscal year 1999 and fiscal year
2000 performance plans. Any limitations on the reliability of
the data used to measure goals are discussed in the appropriate
sections of the performance plan. The Department's performance
goals and measures for programs administered by performance
partners rely for the most part on data sources that have
supported program decision-making for many years. Where it is
appropriate, standards for the validation and verification of
data from such performance partners will be consistent with the
intended purpose of the data, which is to ``inform'' decision-
making processes. The HHS Fiscal Year 2000 Performance Plan
Summary includes a Department-wide discussion of the data
challenges faced by HHS programs and their implementation
partners. More detailed, program-specific discussions of data
issues are included in the individual performance plans of the
HHS agencies.
HHS and its Operating Divisions have made an effort to
ensure that performance goals will be high-quality indicators
of performance. Because of the way that HHS programs intersect
with those of State and other non-Federal partners, HHS pursues
program performance measurement with the cooperation and
authoritative participation of its partners. HHS has developed
performance goals and measures with a focused outcome in mind.
HHS seeks to identify high-quality performance data that will
inform deliberations of HHS and other decision-makers in
improving the programs that serve the health and human service
needs of the public.
Throughout the implementation of the Results Act, HHS has
encouraged its programs to coordinate with other programs, both
within and outside the Department, that share objectives or
serve similar customer groups and to briefly discuss this
coordination in their performance plans. Due to the extensive
involvement and authority of non-Federal partners in program
implementation and management, HHS programs have consulted
significantly with their program partners and stakeholders in
the identification of program outcomes and the development of
goals and data sources to measure progress towards those
outcomes. For example, the Health Care Financing Administration
has led negotiations with the States to develop a goal and
targets pertaining to the Children's Health Insurance Program.
The Health Resources and Services Administration and Office of
Public Health Service have agreed to use the same goal.
Evidence of the coordination of crosscutting activities can
be found in both the Performance Plan Summary and in the
Operating Divisions' annual performance plans. The Summary
serves as the source document for understanding the cross-
cutting, coordinated nature of HHS approaches to meeting the
long-term objectives of the Department. The Summary also
highlights coordination efforts across the Federal government.
Program-specific discussions of coordination activities can
also be found in the Operating Division annual performance
plans.
Many of the programs administered by HHS involve goals and
objectives that are shared by other programs within the
Department and by other agencies and departments within the
Federal government. The overlap between these programs could be
viewed as being duplicative and redundant. However, they often
involve a range of interventions that are dissimilar and
represent complementary--rather than duplicative--approaches.
For example, in the tobacco programs, several agencies
contribute to the Department's goals to reduce tobacco use,
especially among youth. The Food and Drug Administration and
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration
[SAMHSA] programs limit tobacco access to minors with an
emphasis on enforcement, National Institutes of Health conducts
research on nicotine addiction, and Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention promotes smoking cessation and prevention
programs directed at youth. In some cases, the programs differ
from one another because of uncertainty about what will work.
In such cases, the range of interventions represents natural
experiments and provides information to society about the most
effective approach.
data reliability
For the most part, HHS agencies collect data from reliable
data systems that have informed decision-making for several
years. However, the reporting requirements of the Results Act
do not adequately accommodate the needs of States, local
governments, universities, other grantees and other performance
partners in reporting about program performance. Traditionally,
reporting of program data by such entities requires
significantly longer time frames than those defined in GPRA.
Non-Federal program performance partners participate in GPRA
voluntarily because they are not specifically required by GPRA
to be held accountable for the performance reporting required
under the Act. Because they are often the sole sources for the
information on outcomes that is most valuable for GPRA
assessment, HHS has pursued voluntary cooperation of
performance partners in providing data to assess program
performance under GPRA.
ii. high-risk problems
In January 1999, GAO published a report identifying high-
risk problems identified in Federal agencies. In his letter to
Secretary Shalala on the matter, Senator Thompson, chairman of
the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, acknowledged the
positive efforts of HHS to develop performance goals for
management challenges identified by the GAO and the HHS Office
of the Inspector General. In its fiscal year 2000 plan, HHS had
direct goals for 12 of 14 areas identified as weaknesses. The
Subcommittee will continue to monitor HHS' efforts to rectify
these high-risk problems.
iii. consultations
GPRA requires consultation with Congress on strategic
plans. HHS did conduct a series of formal consultations with
committees of the House and the Senate on its current strategic
plan, and will do so in the upcoming revision. HHS did not
consult formally on performance plans, since the Act does not
require it.
The Budget Office within the Office of the Assistant
Secretary for Management and Budget has the lead for the
implementation of GPRA across HHS. Given the decentralized
structure of the separate components of HHS and the
disaggregated nature of its performance plan, HHS relies
primarily on its Operating Divisions to develop annual goals
and measures for individual programs.
iv. usefulness
HHS and its Operating Divisions have worked to make the HHS
Performance Plan Summary and the Operating Division performance
plans clear, coherent and user-friendly. HHS has attempted to
make its presentation of performance as informative and useful
as possible to a wide array of audiences.
The HHS Performance Plan consists of the HHS Performance
Plan Summary and the individual Operating Division Performance
Plans. The HHS Performance Plan Summary provides the linkage
between the Departmental strategic objectives and the annual
performance measures used by each operating division and
program to achieve these longer-term objectives. The Operating
Divisions base the annual goals and targets for each program
activity on the longer-term objectives established in the
strategic plan, the legislative intent of the program activity
(i.e. its programmatic intent and daily operations), and the
budget request for the program activity. Each Operating
Division Performance Plan provides detailed performance
information by program activity that addresses these linkages.
As greater amounts of reliable and valid performance
information become available, the Performance Plan may become
more useful as a tool for making budget decisions. However,
until performance information matures over time, the utility of
the performance plans will be somewhat limited. In addition,
observations of performance data for a single year will not be
particularly definitive or valuable in making decisions about
program improvements or funding levels.
Over the last year, HHS has responded to valid OMB
criticisms that plans across HHS lacked standardization. As a
result, the HHS-wide GPRA Management Team developed a
standardized presentation format that all HHS components will
apply to fiscal year 2001 performance plans and reports. It is
anticipated that these changes will make the plans more useful
and informative.
DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION
i. performance goals and measures
In general, the performance goals and measures for the
Department of Education [DOE] are fairly comprehensive and
relate to nearly all of the Department's budgeted programs and
activities.
In general, DOE's performance objectives and measures are
results-oriented. They focus on improving conditions or
expanding opportunities for students and other stakeholders
such as teachers or DOE employees. For example, one DOE
objective is to have a talented and dedicated teacher in every
classroom in America. One of the performance measures states
that throughout the nation, the percentage of secondary school
teachers who have at least a minor degree in the subject they
teach will increase annually. Another objective states that
greater public school choice will be available to students and
families. Performance measures provide that by 2003, 25 percent
of all public school students in grades 3-12 will attend a
school that they or their parents have chosen.
It is difficult to judge how challenging all of the goals
and measures are without past performance information for each
goal. As required for all agencies, DOE's first annual
performance report is due this spring. Once agencies begin
reporting on the actual levels of performance they have
achieved, determining how challenging performance goals are
will become easier.
Many of the performance goals and measures in the
agencywide performance plan were generally objective,
measurable, and quantifiable, but many in the individual
program performance plans were not. The Subcommittee noted that
many of the performance measures for individual programs lacked
quantifiable baselines or targeted levels of performance for
the fiscal year, which could hinder the Department's ability to
assess its performance.
The plan calls for the supporting and funding of education
programs in the States, localities and universities, and
effectively managing the use of these resources, thereby
creating the potential for competing demands. The Subcommittee
believes there is a sense of balance in how the plan approaches
these potential competing demands. As an example, one objective
discusses how DOE will provide greater flexibility to State and
local educational agencies while maintaining accountability for
program performance.
Nearly all objectives in DOE's plan include a discussion of
the coordination the Department will need with other Federal
agencies to achieve the objective and, in general terms,
describe the issues or efforts that require this coordination.
But the plan does not identify or describe common or
complementary performance goals and measures elsewhere in the
Federal government that relate to DOE's goals and measures; nor
do the individual program performance plans discuss
coordination or complementary goals and measures.
In its effort to identify duplicate programs, DOE's
performance plan includes a separate appendix listing agencies
with overlapping or similar programs with which DOE will need
to coordinate.
ii. data reliability
Data reliability continues to be a problem for DOE. Since
the early 1990s, DOE has been challenged to fully develop
accounting and financial information management systems that
would generate complete and accurate data to support its
performance plans and performance reports. DOE's OIG reported
in its fiscal year 1997 audit report that the Department's
financial management systems did not substantially comply with
the Federal Financial Management Improvement Act of 1996. For
example, DOE does not have a subsidiary ledger to track
guaranty agency activity for both loans receivable and reserves
held by guaranty agencies. In addition, although it began to
use a new integrated financial management system in May 1998,
the Department continues to experience difficulties in
implementing and operating this system.
More recently, DOE's preparation of the fiscal year 1998
financial statements and the related audit were delayed until
the Department reconciled the general ledger data and resolved
significant differences between the general ledger and other
related information. The independent auditor rendered a
disclaimer of opinion on DOE's fiscal year 1998 financial
statements because of serious deficiencies in the Department's
systems, recordkeeping, documentation, financial reporting, and
controls.
In general, the DOE performance plan describes the
limitations of its performance data and its efforts to verify
the reliability of performance measures. For example, for one
performance indicator--to annually increase the percentage of
students and their parents who obtain information on the
academic requirements for college or other postsecondary
education--the Department acknowledges that no data currently
exist on the extent to which students obtain this information.
The plan also says that DOE will supplement any data
limitations with the results of evaluation studies it conducts
or contracts out as well as with the results of onsite reviews
or routine monitoring by Department staff.
The plan also recognizes that the large number of
individual education programs in States, communities, and
schools makes it even more difficult to create sound
measurement systems, due to differences in their data
collection and reporting techniques, and that it may take
several years to fully develop and implement measures to
improve reliability.
There are instances, however, where the plan recognizes
data limitations, but does not indicate how some of them will
be resolved. For example, there is an objective to ensure that
postsecondary students receive the financial aid and support
services they need to complete their education. One indicator
for this objective states that the Department will assess
whether the gap in college graduation rates between low-income
and high-income, and minority and nonminority students is
decreasing. The Department expects to acquire these data from
the Beginning Postsecondary Students Study, which is conducted
only once every 8 years. Until these data are available, DOE is
using data from another source. But these data do not capture
differences in graduation rates by income level, and the plan
does not note how DOE will acquire these data.
iii. high risk problems
Of the five major management challenges GAO identified in
the Department, three are addressed through performance
objectives in the plan. For the other two, the plan describes
steps DOE will take to address the challenges, but does not
outline specific goals or objectives to do so.
The Subcommittee believes DOE is committed to addressing
these challenges and has made some progress in addressing
management shortcomings, such as reducing the default rate on
Federal student loans. The performance plan addresses these
challenges; however, progress since its issuance has been
sparse. For example, there is a debate within the Department as
to the best strategy for integrating the information systems
supporting the student aid programs. DOE received a disclaimer
of opinion on its fiscal year 1998 financial statement audit
because of weaknesses in a new automated accounting system,
inadequate account reconciliations, and insufficient
documentation for transactions.
iv. usefulness
Although it is voluminous (2 volumes totaling around 500
pages), the Department's performance plan is generally helpful,
informative and relatively easy to navigate. It is well
organized--the descriptions for each goal and objective
consistently follow the same format. The plan shows clear
linkages between annual goals and objectives and the strategic
plan, the Department's budget, and its mission statement.
However, the large number of performance objectives and
indicators make the plan more difficult to comprehend.
Generally, DOE provides clear linkages between and among
the plan's annual performance goals, the mission and goals
established in the strategic plan, the budget program
activities, and its day-to-day operations. The order in which
performance goals and objectives are described in the
performance plan mirrors the organization in the strategic
plan. It contains a separate appendix that generally relates
each of the Department's budgeted program activities to one or
more strategic plan goals and objectives. However, the
Subcommittee found a few program activities that were not
included in this appendix--in particular, the departmental
management account that funds agency operations. Another plan
appendix shows the funding and staffing resources associated
with each objective, but it does not explain how these resource
levels were determined from the program activities in DEO's
budget request.
The description for each strategic objective includes a
fairly lengthy discussion of key strategies for achieving that
objective, including the role of budgetary resources and
legislative initiatives. The descriptions also list Department
programs that support the objective.
DOE's plan provides a general picture of intended
performance across the agency, a general discussion of
strategies and resources the agency will use to achieve its
goals, and general confidence that agency performance
information will be credible. In these respects, the plan is a
useful document. The plan includes tables linking performance
goals and measures to most budgeted programs and activities. In
addition, the plan includes baseline or trend data for most
performance indicators, discusses need for coordination with
other Federal agencies, describes data limitations and
verification of the reliability of performance measures, and
shows how evaluations will be used to supplement for
performance measurement shortcomings.
DOE's plan could be improved by more completely discussing
coordination of specific programs with similar programs in
other agencies, as well as coordination of complementary
performance goals and measures, including separate discussions
of how capital assets, mission critical management systems, or
human capital will support achievement of program results, and
indicating how existing data limitations will be resolved.
SUBCOMMITTEE ON TRANSPORTATION
i. performance goals and measures
Generally, the Department of Transportation's [DOT]
performance goals and measures focus on several of the most
important challenges facing the Department. However, one of the
weaknesses cited by the GAO in its review of the Department's
performance plan was the lack of a consistent link of the
performance goals to the strategic outcomes and the lack of
consistent inclusion of goals and measures for addressing the
management challenges facing the Department. The Office of
Inspector General [OIG] identified the lack of accountability
for financial activities as a key challenge for DOT. It is too
early to tell whether the Department's recognition of this
continuing deficiency has been adequately addressed by the
steps taken in response to the OIG recommendations. Many of the
challenges identified by the GAO and the OIG are long-standing
and will require sustained attention by DOT and the Congress.
The Department's goals and measures are result-oriented,
with the caveats noted above. The plan's goals and measures are
objective, quantifiable, and measurable. For all except a few
performance goals, the Department's plans describe target
levels of performance in both annual and multi-year terms.
The Department's goals and measures vary depending on the
likelihood of meeting the challenge. Almost invariably, the
goals and measures move the Department toward qualitative or
quantitative improvement in the safety and performance
challenges generally considered to be the primary Federal
issues relating to transportation.
Tradeoffs between competing goals are not readily obvious,
and the Subcommittee has not identified any unintended or
perverse effects from the articulated goals or measures. A more
relevant concern might be the myriad activities to address a
specific initiative, i.e., the identified high-risk information
technology initiative for the Federal Aviation Administration's
[FAA] air traffic control modernization program. The DOT plan
could be focused and significantly improved in this specific
area by consistently including goals and measures for
addressing endemic, long-term problems facing the Department in
the procurement, information technology, and financial
management arenas.
The DOT performance plan notes the obvious cross-cutting
activities at other Federal agencies, but the Subcommittee
believes that cross-cutting issues present an area ripe for
efficiencies or for goal specialization. For example, the plan
states that both the FAA and the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration have similar performance goals in the area of
aviation fatalities. However, the plan is thin on the nature of
the coordination or in describing the relative roles played by
the respective agencies in meeting that goal. Further, several
possible shared goals with other agencies are either not
articulated at this point or are not areas in which DOT
envisions management or programmatic advantages from greater
coordination. Another danger of plans built with substantial
cross agency participation and support is that, unless the
additional agencies share the Department's enthusiasm for the
program the Department can quickly find itself the single
parent of a very resource-demanding program in its infancy.
Greater coordination and reconciling of plans and budget
submissions should help foster cross-departmental initiatives.
The current plan does not identify crosscutting programs.
ii. data reliability
In most of the general goal and performance measures, DOT
has information sources available to generate reliable data to
support the performance plan and to credibly report to Congress
on the status of progress toward identified goals. However, a
continuing deficiency for DOT generally has been a lack of
accountability for the Department's financial activities and an
impaired ability to manage programs, procurements, and
activities in an effective and efficient manner. Since the
early 1990s, when the OIG began auditing the financial
statements of certain agencies within DOT, the OIG has been
unable to determine whether the reported financial results are
correct and has accordingly been unable to clear the statement
with an unqualified opinion. The main deficiencies have been
the Department's inability to reliably determine the
quantities, the locations, and the value of property, plant,
equipment and inventory. Financial management weaknesses at the
FAA contribute significantly to this problem. The Department
lacks a cost accounting system or an alternative system for
reporting project and activity costs. This deficiency generally
makes it questionable whether DOT can adequately link costs
factors with performance measures in any area of financial,
procurement, or cost effectiveness.
The Department notes that it is pursuing cost accounting
improvements, but the Subcommittee is concerned that any real
improvement in this risk area is at least two years off. In
addition, the plan acknowledges identified concerns about
limitations and expresses a willingness and intent to remedy
shortcomings. However, on an anecdotal basis, it is difficult
to identify actions taken toward those ends at this time.
The GAO does note that the 2000 performance plan made
substantial improvements over the 1999 plan in the area of
performance measures to address the data issue weaknesses.
Whether these measures remedy the current weaknesses is still
an open question.
iii. high risk problems
The Department continues to have substantial problems in
two major risk areas identified by GAO: (1) significant cost
overruns, schedule delays and performance shortfalls
experienced by the air traffic control modernization program;
and (2) serious financial management weaknesses at the FAA.
These problems have been documented and identified by the OIG,
GAO, the Department and Congress, and solutions have been
suggested. Although some actions have been taken to address
these recommendations, major performance and management
challenges persist.
These high risk areas are not new to the agencies or DOT.
Solutions have been elusive, but the Subcommittee has no reason
to question the Department's commitment to finding long term
solutions for any of the GAO or IG identified problems.
iv. consultations
The Subcommittee staff has maintained an ongoing dialogue
with Department officials involved with the Results Act
requirements and effort. The benefit of consultations is more
relevant as the performance plan elements migrate into budget
formulation and execution within DOT and the individual modal
administrations. That evolution has yet to fully be embraced by
the entire Department, even though Results Act integration
responsibilities are vested in the Office of Budget and
Programs. Concurrent responsibility for budget formulation in
the Office of the Secretary by itself does not insure
individual modal attention to performance goals or guarantee
that OMB will respect the programmatic requirements of those
goals as annual budgets are formulated and reviewed.
v. usefulness
A second printing of the Department's performance plan was
required due to other agency interest in the Department's
innovative plan approaches. The plan is clear, concise and well
organized, and it warrants favorable comparison to other recent
publications by transportation officials and opinion-makers.
The Department's plan provides the necessary linkages
between performance goals and mission statements. However, the
Department's ability to implement performance management is
limited by the lack of a reliable cost accounting system and
the management problems in procurement and personnel
management. Clearly, DOT has made major strides with its
performance plan, but that plan has yet to penetrate the day-
to-day operations of the Department, the modal administrations,
or the procurement or personnel processes.
The plans are very useful documents for determining how DOT
views the relative and absolute importance of its disparate
goals. In addition, it is a valuable gauge of whether the
Departmental leadership is serious about remedying identified
deficiencies or inconsistencies in programs, activities,
management, or direction.
The Department has been recognized as a leader in
implementing the Results Act. GAO noted that the Department's
Fiscal Year 2000 Performance Plan should be a useful tool for
decision makers. It provides a clear picture of intended
performance across DOT, a specific discussion of the strategies
and resources that DOT will use to achieve its goals, and
general confidence that the Department's performance
information will be credible.
However, GAO also noted improvements that could be made to
the Department's plan. Two of the recommended improvements
relate to the critical management challenges identified by GAO
and DOT's OIG. GAO suggested that consistently including goals
and specific measures for addressing these challenges and a
full explanation of how the Department will address certain
financial management challenges would improve the plan. Other
GAO suggestions include: (1) including at least one annual
performance goal for each strategic outcome; (2) describing the
nature of the coordination with other Federal agencies that
have outcomes in common with DOT and consistently discussing
the Department's contribution to the crosscutting programs; and
(3) improvements in data systems.
SUBCOMMITTEE ON TREASURY AND GENERAL GOVERNMENT
DEPARTMENT OF THE TREASURY
i. performance goals and measures
The Department of the Treasury has four key missions in
fiscal year 2000. Fulfillment of these missions requires
actions by all agencies and entities within the Department.
However, the Department has also developed the following
additional performance goals and outcomes for each mission:
(1) Promote a prosperous and stable American and world
economy (economic mission);
(2) Effectively manage the Government's finances (financial
mission);
(3) Protect our financial systems and our nation's leaders,
and foster a safe and drug-free America (law enforcement
mission); and
(4) Continue to build a strong institution (management
mission).
As reflected in individual agency performance measures,
measures are expressed both as outcomes (maintain or improve
economic conditions in developing countries) and as processes
or activities (Customs Service air travel compliance rate of
97.7 percent). Because of the wide-ranging jurisdiction, this
appears to be appropriate.
As a reflection of individual agency goals, most are
reasonably challenging, in some cases (such as Customs Service)
the result of the fine-tuning of measures. There is a
combination of recurring measures, discontinued measures, and
new measures, which leads to the conclusion that the
performance plan is an evolving document.
Reliable measurement is dependent upon the individual
agency or bureau. The Department required each agency or bureau
to rate its performance data as having either reasonable
accuracy or as having questionable or unknown accuracy. Those
isolated measures which were identified as questionable or
unknown are being evaluated to determine what needs to be done
to improve the reliability of the data.
Several agencies contribute to each mission statement.
Because the Department's performance measures reflect
individual agency measures, it appears that great care has been
taken by the Department to ensure balance.
There are some cross-cutting programs and activities
similar to those in other areas of the Federal Government, such
as the mission to ``foster a safe and drug-free America''.
While these relationships are not specifically addressed in the
Department's performance goals, in practice the agencies have
formed close cooperative working relationships with other
entities, and these relationships are reflected in their
individual plans.
ii. data reliability
Because the Department's performance plan relies heavily on
individual agency performance, the level of data reliability
varies. For example, statistical agencies such as the Bureau of
Public Debt have extremely reliable data, and the Bureau of
Engraving and Printing has the ability to track items such as
manufacturing costs for currency. On the other end of the
spectrum, the Internal Revenue Service [IRS] is currently
struggling with development of a new information technology
modernization project and must rely upon outmoded technology
for data collection. The Department's performance plan does not
address any potential data limitations or weaknesses.
iii. high risk programs
GAO highlighted four general challenges facing the
Department of the Treasury: (1) IRS management and performance
issues, (2) Customs Service financial management, (3) Financial
Management Service financial management issues, and (4)
department-wide financial management weaknesses. The
performance plans for individual agencies reflect efforts to
address these issues. The Department's performance plan
contains a performance measure regarding the audit opinion on
consolidated Treasury-wide financial statements.
The Department's performance measures for the goal to
``Continue to build a strong institution'' contain the measure
of an unqualified audit opinion in fiscal year 2000. Since
there have been qualified opinions since fiscal year 1998,
reaching that indicator will require a serious commitment on
the part of Treasury.
iv. consultations
Individual agency performance plans were discussed with
Subcommittee staff during the annual budget briefings. This is
also the case with the Departmental offices' performance
proposals. Over the past couple of years, the various agencies
have incorporated the results of these consultations into
subsequent submissions, making the consultations effective from
the Subcommittee's point of view.
Until recently, there were two separate staffs responsible
for budget and Results Act implementation, with the budget
staff overseeing the evaluation and linkage issues. The
Department recently merged these responsibilities under one
deputy assistant secretary who is responsible for both budget
and planning. While having separate staffs did not actually
impede effective consultation, the merging of responsibilities
will result in a more streamlined effort and information flow.
v. usefulness
The Department's concise summary of performance measures
delineates the agency measures which impact a particular
mission statement. If any additional information or explanation
is required, it can be found in the individual agency's plan.
The performance measures are listed as supporting a
particular mission statement which shows a clear link to that
mission. However, because this is a concise summary of
individual agency measures, it does not include references to
budget program activities or day-to-day operations. Those
linkages should be contained in the individual agency plans.
A summary of the Department-wide missions is extremely
useful in seeing the big picture and as a measure of the role
of the entities contained in the Departmental offices account.
It is particularly useful because it shows the evolution of the
measures for a particular mission by the inclusion of
continuing measures, discontinued measures, and newly added
measures. The Department further required individual agency and
bureau plans to be integrated with the budget justification
documents, which has been especially useful.
Customs Service
i. performance goals and measures
The Customs Service has reorganized its operations around
the following 3 core business processes which enable Customs to
manage its programs and activities: (1) trade compliance (the
commercial importation of merchandise), (2) passenger
processing (the processing of passengers entering and leaving
the U.S.), and (3) outbound processing (the commercial
exportation of merchandise). In addition to these core
processes, the enforcement systems area, when combined with the
business processes, encompass all of Customs' operational
activities. From these processes, Customs has developed 39
performance measures.
Customs' mission is to ensure that all goods and persons
entering and exiting the United States do so in compliance with
all laws and regulations. Customs, in conjunction with other
Federal agencies, represents one of the Nation's principal
means of border enforcement. Customs is establishing a
framework for seeking improvements in organizational
performance by focusing on improving service to its compliant
customers while enhancing effective enforcement against willful
violators.
Customs' goals and measures are reflected in terms of
general policy statements such as ``maximizing trade
compliance'', whereby the agency tries to measure the
compliance level. The goals are not always inherently
quantifiable. The majority of the goals and measures are
expressed in terms of processes and activities and not as
outcomes.
Customs has found, through the evaluation of its fiscal
year 1998 performance plan, that many of its commercial targets
were overly aggressive and resulted in Customs achieving only
11 of its 28 performance goals. Customs has achieved high
levels of compliance in its air and land passenger processes
and in revenue collection compliance. To improve trade
compliance, Customs continues to pursue modernization efforts
and will implement a formal set of trade surveys to assess
customer perceptions and attitudes, while implementing more
aggressive enforcement measures when necessary.
Throughout this process, Customs has realized that some of
its original measures were not sufficient to achieve the goals
set forth. Therefore, the agency has worked to modify or
eliminate the ineffective measures through a formal evaluation
process. In addition, Customs is implementing new means by
which to receive critical performance information, particularly
relating to the impressions of those that interact and are the
``customers'' of the Customs Service.
The largest difficulty Customs faces in terms of measuring
performance is that Customs' mission of compliance and drug
interdiction does not have defined scope upon which success or
failure can be statistically based. For example, Customs can
state how many pounds of drugs it has interdicted in any given
year, but it cannot estimate the amount of drugs that are not
interdicted or detected at the border. The biggest challenge
for Customs is to translate an undefinable environment into
effective, measurable goals and performance measures.
Of those which are quantifiable, Customs' performance
measures have undergone major changes during the last few
fiscal years. The agency recognizes that there is still much
work to be done, as is evident in the development of several
baseline measures and the discontinuation of other measures.
The 1998 fiscal year for Customs was a continuous process of
improving measures, evaluating how data was captured and
validated, and how to more accurately capture the outcome and
impact of mission related information. One example is that
Customs is working to develop a new set of narcotic and money
laundering outcome measures, which, when viewed in conjunction
with the traditional outputs, paint a better portrait of the
organization's impact.
Customs will continue the process of identifying and
improving measures and better defining what should be measured
within the organization. The real challenge for Customs is to
determine if it is measuring what it should be measuring, to
develop new measures or refine existing measures, to ensure
data integrity of the new measures, and ultimately to use the
data to assist in making sound resource decisions.
The Customs Service is in a unique position because its
role at the border is shared with the Immigration and
Naturalization Service [INS], and the inspectors for both
agencies work side by side. Currently, the Customs Service and
INS are carrying out the Border Coordination Initiative, a
long-term effort to improve cooperation and performance of INS
and Customs resources. Customs contemplates instituting another
intensive narcotics enforcement effort. It will further refine
the operations of its field intelligence teams for both
agencies. The Border Coordination Initiative is specifically
mentioned in Customs' performance plan.
ii. data reliability
Customs is developing tools to ensure performance
measurement data integrity. For most of the data elements used
in measuring performance, Customs has designated a data owner
for that element. The owner of the data element is responsible
for ensuring the quality and validity of the data and for
assigning a ``quality rating'' for its respective element.
In general, Customs verifies and validates its data using
an array of methods. These include management inspections,
headquarters and field reviews, automated edits, program
reviews, other agency validation, private sector feedback, and
IG and GAO audits. An overriding concern continues to be the
ability of the agency to establish mechanisms which can
effectively and reliably collect the data being sought.
There is an inherent weakness with the data because Customs
operates in an environment that cannot always be quantified.
The primary example is that it is impossible to estimate and
measure the amount of drugs that cross the border undetected.
Customs acknowledges this weakness and continues to work with
other agencies in a Federal effort to work toward better
identification of the size of the drug problem.
In aspects where Customs can quantify the data, Customs is
improving data collection by developing new baselines and using
technology to assist the data collection and improve the
validity of the data collected.
iii. high risk programs
The asset forfeiture program, administered by Customs and
the Justice Department, was on GAO's high-risk list since the
inception of the list in 1990. Since the publication of the
list in early 1999, Customs has been removed from the GAO high-
risk list. The Department of Treasury, however, does remain on
the list for seized asset management. There were no specific
goals or measures included in the fiscal year 2000 performance
plan for this issue. There are, however, action items in the
Commissioner's Action Plan relating to this problem.
iv. consultations
During the first year of reporting, fiscal year 1998, the
Customs Service provided extensive briefings to get input and
feedback from the Subcommittee. In addition, during this
process Customs shared the means by which it was building its
plans and how it wanted to proceed. As the plans have become
more refined over time, the Customs Service has consulted with
the Subcommittee on its performance plans concurrently with the
Subcommittee's review of Customs' budget.
As a result of the consultations, the Customs Service and
the Department of the Treasury as a whole have completely
integrated their performance plans into their budget
submission. Customs has taken each budget initiative and
presented it in terms of its performance plan, which provides
the Subcommittee the ability to validate the budget requests
against the performance measures, and vice versa.
The budget document is the vehicle for the performance
measures. The agency's performance plan is contained within the
agency's budget submission, but the work is done by a separate
planning staff that is closely linked with the budget office.
v. usefulness
Customs' performance plan is very clear and concise. It
provides the Subcommittee with sufficient detail without
providing too much information.
There are definitive links between the plan's goals and the
mission. In fact, the primary component of the plan is the
section titled ``Relationship between the strategic plan and
the annual performance plan,'' whereby each strategic goal and
objective are laid out against the performance goal to which
they are linked. In addition, the plan includes a section which
lists those measures currently under administrative review
because they are being either considered or validated. Finally,
the most informative section of the plan is the ``Definitions
of Performance Measures'' section which sets out each budget
activity, defines all of the 39 performance measures, the
accuracy and means by which the measure will be verified, and
any current data available.
The performance plan enables the Subcommittee to evaluate
the importance of the budget requests by how well they coincide
with the performance plan. The plan has been a useful tool
because, as a result of the Subcommittee's oversight, the
agency has begun to ask itself the same questions of relevancy
and relation to mission with respect to initiatives of interest
to the Subcommittee. As a result, the agency and the
Subcommittee are streamlining the requests put forth and
validating their merit based on the agency's ability to stress
the initiative's importance in relation to the agency's
mission. Those initiatives that cannot be sufficiently
justified are eliminated, and those that are meritorious can be
promoted throughout the appropriations cycle.
One critical piece that is missing from the plan is a
section on those programs which were eliminated because a
duplication of effort was found as a result of implementing the
performance plan. Also, the Subcommittee would find it very
useful to have information about those initiatives which were
eliminated or phased out as a result of the implementation of
the performance plan, i.e., an initiative that was found to
underperform because the plan was used.
Internal Revenue Service
i. performance goals and measures
The Internal Revenue Service [IRS] has been undergoing a
massive restructuring effort in recent years. This has resulted
in the creation of a new mission statement, goals, and guiding
principles. The mission of the new IRS is to ``provide
America's taxpayers with top quality service by helping them
understand and meet their tax responsibilities and by applying
the tax law with integrity and fairness to all.'' To implement
this mission, IRS has developed three goals: (1) service to
each taxpayer, (2) service to all taxpayers, and (3)
productivity through a quality work environment.
Each of the four major components of the IRS has its own
set of performance plans, some carried forward from fiscal year
1996. However, the vast majority of the new measurements for
fiscal year 2000 are still under development, and outcomes for
specific measures have not been articulated.
There has been criticism in the past of an apparent lack of
balance between customer service and tax law enforcement. The
IRS believes it has now struck a balance by emphasizing three
major areas: (1) customer satisfaction, (2) employee
satisfaction, and (3) business results. Whether this is
actually the case remains to be seen.
The vast majority of the measurements contained in the IRS
performance plans are measured by quality and quantity. For
example, the Processing, Assistance, and Management component
is focused heavily on the customer service aspects of the IRS
and includes such measurements as refund timeliness (percentage
of refunds issued in less than 21 days) and accuracy rates for
taxpayer inquiries.
Most of the existing and continuing measures anticipate a
steady but gradual improvement, and some expect the IRS to
maintain existing performance. For example, availability of
data to front-line employees 99 percent of the time has been
the goal since fiscal year 1996 and will continue to be so in
fiscal year 2000. Outcomes expected from the new measurements
will be based upon fiscal year 1999 performance and have not
yet been determined. However, the Subcommittee expects the IRS
to continue to strive for improvement in each and every
category.
Because the operations of the IRS are based upon numbers--
taxpayers, refunds, examinations, collections--most of the
objectives can be reliably measured, subject to the
availability of necessary technology. However, the most
important goals--customer satisfaction and employee
satisfaction--are much harder to measure. Unfortunately, for
purposes of this review, those performance measures are among
the many still to be determined.
The IRS must continue to balance taxpayer satisfaction with
its collection responsibilities. Unfortunately, there are many
times when taxpayers are not satisfied when the IRS informs
them that they owe additional taxes under existing tax laws. As
a result of Congressional oversight during the recent past,
emphasis seems to have shifted to customer satisfaction, which
has resulted in a reduction in enforcement collections. The IRS
believes its fiscal year 2000 performance plan strikes an
appropriate balance.
The IRS is solely responsible for the enforcement of
internal revenue laws and statutes, and for the collection of
income taxes, social insurance and retirement taxes, as well as
excise, estate, and gift taxes. The other entity with tax-
collection responsibility is the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and
Firearms, which collects taxes on alcohol, tobacco, firearms,
and explosives. Because their responsibilities are clearly
delineated in statute, there are no cross-cutting programs or
activities.
ii. data reliability
The IRS has been relying upon older information systems for
tracking both revenue and performance measurements. This
fulfills the agency's requirement that all measures must have
reasonable accuracy. However, it should be noted that after a
somewhat shaky start, the IRS has taken positive steps to
ensure that the ongoing information technology modernization
project continues to move forward at a deliberative, albeit
slow, pace. In order to ensure that funds are spent wisely,
which has not been the case in the past, Congress has required
that the IRS outline expenditures before funding is released.
As a result of careful oversight by Congress, GAO, OMB, and
the IRS Management Board at the Treasury Department, the
project appears to be back on track. While there could be early
positive results in some specific programs, the entire project
will take at least 10 years to complete. The IRS will continue
to use the existing legacy systems to track performance
measurements.
iii. high risk programs
Unfortunately, GAO has identified seven issues which are
described as ``formidable challenges'' facing the IRS which
should be addressed separately.
--Restructuring the IRS organization and business practices
to better balance its efforts between taxpayer
assistance and enforcement.--As outlined by the summary
of its plan, the IRS has moved forward to redesign the
business practices of the agency into 4 operating
divisions, each with responsibility for a specific
segment or segments of taxpayers. Once this transition
is complete, the IRS believes that this redesign will
help it to meet all 3 major goals of the agency.
--Correcting management and technical weaknesses in its
systems modernization efforts.--As previously stated,
the IRS is in the process of implementing its
information technology modernization efforts. A big
step forward was the awarding of the PRIME contract
late last year to serve as the developer and integrator
for this project. The lines of responsibility are being
defined but have not yet been completed.
--Resolving financial management and control weaknesses that
affect its ability to adequately manage its financial
operations.--Because of the age of the existing
information technology infrastructure, the only way to
resolve these problems is with an entirely new,
modernized, replacement system. While those efforts are
underway, it is a long process.
--Addressing problems relating to its ability to collect
Federal tax receivables and other unpaid assessments.--
The performance indicators for the collection activity
for the Tax Law Enforcement account are still under
development, which shows that the IRS is aware of the
problems and working to develop the necessary
performance measures. Fulfilling many of the
performance measures is dependent upon completion of
information technology applications.
--Assessing the impact of various efforts IRS has under way
to reduce filing fraud.--Unfortunately, the fiscal year
2000 performance plan does not mention this problem.
The IRS acknowledges that its plan does not address
this issue directly, but assures staff that it will do
so in the future.
--Improving security controls over information systems to
address weaknesses that place taxpayer data at risk to
both internal and external treats.--Security is a
continuing concern for the IRS and has been part of the
IRS performance plan since fiscal year 1998. While
there have been some improvements over time, inclusion
of this concern on the GAO high-risk list shows that
much more needs to be done. The explanation of the
proposed performance plan for the Information Systems
account indicates that as Y2K efforts wind down, staff
will be redirected to work on the management of the
huge information technology infrastructure contract.
Security should be an integral part of that contract.
--Modifying information systems to properly function in the
year 2000.--This has been the top priority for the IRS.
While the written performance plan does not include
specific measures, it is obvious that the IRS must
ensure the continued operation of the information
systems into the next century. This is clearly
articulated in the fiscal year 2000 proposed
performance plan explanation.
The IRS is taking each of the items seriously and has been
working with GAO to address its concerns. The Subcommittee will
carefully monitor IRS's efforts and progress in rectifying
these problems.
iv. consultations
The IRS is a huge agency with numerous serious problems. As
a result, the performance plan contains descriptions of several
ongoing major efforts. The IRS has consistently kept the
Subcommittee informed of its plans and progress. The
Subcommittee expects consultation efforts to continue as the
IRS moves forward with specific, incremental expenditure plans
which must be approved before funds can be released.
Consultations with IRS management representatives have been
informative for the Subcommittee, and feedback useful for IRS
management.
The Results Act and budget staffs have been separate
entities for the development of existing performance and
strategic plans. Each was handled by a different group, which
resulted in some disconnects between the strategic plan and
performance plans. As part of the ongoing IRS modernization
plan, these entities have been merged into a Strategic Planning
and Budgeting group. This merger should result in a closer
coordination of strategy and performance and eliminate problems
(such as no performance plan to address the need to reduce
filing fraud).
The split responsibilities resulted in large numbers of IRS
staff briefing appropriations staff. The new merged
responsibility should make subsequent consultation much easier
and informative.
v. usefulness
The IRS performance plan is well presented. It starts with
the overall mission statement, proceeds to the three major
goals and the 5 guiding principles, and then to the 5 levers of
change. This is followed by specific performance for the IRS as
a whole, as well as the 4 major appropriated accounts. Each is
clearly stated and presented in such a way that it does, in
fact, inform rather than overwhelm.
Although the measurable goals of some of the performance
plan expectations are still being developed, the actual
performance measures are articulated, which gives the
Subcommittee a clear understanding of how each performance
measure contributes to one of the 3 major goals.
The IRS performance plan is a useful tool for realizing the
magnitude of the task ahead of the new IRS. It clearly shows
the intended use of requested funding levels. The fiscal year
2001 performance plan, which is expected to have greater
detailed indicators for specific measures, will be even more
useful in determining whether this year's funding decisions
were appropriate.
The IRS has done a good job of presenting the formidable
tasks facing this evolving entity. The Subcommittee understands
that not all of the newly developed performance measures have
defined indicators, especially considering that the fiscal year
1999 performance will be the baseline for future performance
indicators. It is therefore difficult to get a clear picture of
the existing performance and the steps needed to improve in
those areas.
GENERAL SERVICES ADMINISTRATION
i. performance goals and measures
The General Services Administration [GSA] has 4 strategic
goals that are directly linked to the agency objective to
provide, as cost effectively as possible, the space, supplies,
and services Federal employees need to do their jobs. GSA
provides these services through the Public Building Service
[PBS], the Federal Supply Service, the Federal Technology
Service, and the Office of Government-wide Policy. GSA has the
following 4 strategic goals which pervade all of its functions:
(1) to promote responsible asset management, (2) to compete
effectively for the Federal market, (3) to excel at customer
service, and (4) to anticipate future workforce needs.
GSA's goals and measures are evenly mixed among outcomes
and processes and activities, for the agency's role is
inherently activity-based. Agency management is focused on
defining and adapting in a rapidly changing environment. GSA is
in the process of refocusing its activity-based measures and
goals so they are more outcome based. For example, the plan now
includes goals and related targets for assessing the level of
satisfaction among GSA's federal customers. GSA is evolving
from an operations-based organization that performs services
for Federal agencies to a procurement and contract management
organization that provides goods and services for its Federal
customers.
The goals and measures set out in GSA's performance plan
are reasonably challenging and realistic in that they include
items such as ``Hold annual increases in per mile charges for
interagency fleet vehicles close to inflation.'' However, there
are a few goals which are not as reasonable. For example,
``Complete all construction projects on time'' is a laudable
but unrealistic goal. GSA is reevaluating all of its goals and
measures on a regular basis so they can be modified when the
goals are either unreasonably challenging or unrealistic. This
is evident in the amount of modification the strategic plan has
undergone since 1998. GSA goals in the fiscal year 2000 plan
are more quantifiable than previous years.
GSA's purpose and functions are inherently measurable
because the agency's work is process-oriented. For fiscal year
2000, 48 of the 58 goals have measures, baselines, and targets
which are quantifiable. For some of the goals and measures, GSA
plans to benchmark itself against the private sector in areas
such as travel and leasing costs. These types of goals and
measures should be especially useful in gauging GSA's future
performance.
GSA's plan did not include any instances of unintended
effects that were avoided.
The 2000 plan shows improvement in its discussion of cross-
cutting issues. In the 2000 plan, GSA mentions the cross-
cutting nature of its activities. In addition, GSA has an
office, the Office of Government-wide Policy [OGP], which is
singly responsible for interagency coordination. GSA, through
OGP, is authorized to provide for a Government-wide system for
procurement and supply of personal property and management
services utilization of available property disposal of surplus
property and records management. By this authority, GSA
develops, facilitates and interprets Government-wide policies
in these areas. GSA collaborates with the Federal community and
others to develop policy and guidelines, to provide education
and training, and to identify best practices in the areas where
GSA has or supports policymaking authority. OGP provides
guidance, information and performance measures to make the
Federal Government's administrative processes more efficient
and effective.
ii. data reliability
The 2000 plan discusses the importance of having the
technological capacity to maintain good data, and the plan's
section on PBS discusses the importance of reliable information
and PBS' implementation of a new system for tracking real
property data. All but 9 of the performance goals have
subsections entitled ``Verification/Validation.'' These
subsections generally identify the source of the data that will
be used as a measure, with some identifying actions to be used
to identify data problems, such as audits of financial records
and systems.
However, the information on data reliability is too general
and does not list GSA's planned actions to verify and validate
the data that will be used to monitor progress and gauge
results. As with many agencies, GSA is struggling to identify
the most effective and efficient means to collect this data and
analyze how it compares with its current data collection
systems. In addition, GSA is still refining what data to
collect. In its plan, GSA does not address how it will meet
these shortfalls until it has a sufficient data collection
system in place; however, GSA does acknowledge the importance
of data reliability.
The plan acknowledges the weakness of data, which is
important, but does not delve into how the agency plans to
change its approach in order to sufficiently verify and
validate its data and the limitations of the current data
collection systems. There is no specific mention of the actions
or the need for a plan to fully address how the agency will
overcome this weakness. In addition, the agency does not
currently have all the necessary systems in place needed to
accurately assess the data collected. However, GSA is fortunate
because it is a process-oriented agency which lends itself
naturally to data collection and systems.
iii. high risk programs
GSA is not on the GAO's high-risk list.
iv. consultations
During the first year of reporting, fiscal year 1998, GSA
provided extensive briefings to get input and feedback from the
Subcommittee. In addition, GSA shared during this process the
means by which it was building its plans and how it wanted to
proceed. As the plans have become more refined over time, GSA
has consulted with the Subcommittee on its performance plans
concurrently with the Subcommittee's review of GSA's budget.
As a result of the consultations, GSA has made the plan
available for discussion simultaneous with the Subcommittee's
review the agency's budget. Unfortunately, the agency has not
completely integrated its performance plan into its budget
submission; the documents are provided separately.
A separate person is responsible for developing the
performance plan. This person coordinates the planning staffs
and the work they do in the 4 services of GSA and reports
directly to the head of the agency budget office.
v. usefulness
The plan is very clear and concise. It begins with an
overview and a clear, charted section on the performance
measures. Most importantly, in a detailed section on
performance measures, it includes a breakout of strategy and
verification/validation and their relationship to each
strategic goal and objective.
The plan does not always show a clear connection between
the performance goals and the specific funding and program
activities in the budget. Without such linkages, decision-
makers will have difficulty relating the performance goals in
the plan to the program activities in the budget. In addition,
it will be difficult for GSA to allocate its anticipated
budgetary resources among its performance goals. Less than half
of the performance goals contain a direct, identifiable link to
the budget; and, beyond that, there are some goals which are
not linked to any performance goals at all. However, there are
instances in which the direct connection of the budget to a
performance measure is made. For example, the goal to reduce
the amount of non-revenue producing space identified
$77,000,000 from the Basic Repair and Alterations program
activity.
From the Subcommittee's perspective, the linkage of the
plan to the budget is the most critical component in order for
the plan to be useful to budgetary decisions made throughout
the fiscal year. Such a plan would enable the agency and the
Subcommittee to streamline the requests put forth and validate
their merit based on the agency's ability to stress the
initiatives' importance in relation to the agency's mission.
Those initiatives that could not be sufficiently justified
would be eliminated and those that are meritorious could then
be promoted throughout the appropriations cycle. That is not to
say that the current plan is not useful without this
information; however, the information is much more difficult
and time consuming to garner without this linkage. In general,
the plan enables the Subcommittee to ask relevant questions
about performance that would not otherwise be a topic of
oversight.
The plan would be more useful if every aspect of the budget
were linked to the plan and vice versa. In addition, it would
be useful to have a section on cost-savings resulting from the
use and implementation of the plan. This section should not
only include the under-performance of some of the agency's
activities, but also the elimination of duplicative efforts
carried out both within GSA and within the Federal Government
as a whole.
OFFICE OF PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT
i. performance goals and measures
The Office of Personnel Management [OPM] is divided into 10
separate components: Office of Merit Systems Oversight and
Effectiveness, Employment Service, Retirement and Insurance
Service, Workforce Compensation and Performance Service,
Investigations Service, Office of Workforce Relations,
Executive Resources, Administrative Services, Executive and
Other Services, and Office of Inspector General.
OPM has developed 5 separate overarching Strategic Goals,
with objectives which span several agency divisions and
functions. As the Federal Government's personnel office, those
responsibilities are wide-ranging, which results in many shared
goals. To achieve the Strategic Goals, each individual division
has its own set of performance goals. For example, Employment
Service has 24 goals, and Retirement and Insurance Service has
16 goals. While each performance goal is an important objective
for the individual division, the total number of performance
goals for the agency is voluminous.
There is a mixture of measures. For example, OPM relies
upon the annual Customer Satisfaction Survey of client agencies
to determine whether they are meeting Goal I: ``Provide policy
direction and leadership to recruit and retain the Federal
workforce required for the 21st Century.'' On the other hand,
Goal IV: ``Deliver high quality, cost-effective human resources
services to Federal agencies, employees, annuitants and the
public'' is measured by accuracy of payments and response
times.
The goals and measures are, on the whole, reasonably
challenging. While the Strategic Goals state the obvious
functions of the agency, the performance goals articulate the
steps the agency plans to take, or continues to take, to reach
that goal. In some instances, it appears that OPM has developed
a performance goal to simply continue to do what it has always
done. At the other end of the spectrum, the goal of
implementing a long term care program for Federal employees is
totally dependent upon enactment of legislation.
OPM relies upon customer satisfaction surveys and employee
surveys to determine whether most performance goals are
realized. The reliability of that measurement depends upon the
reliability of the responses to the surveys and the actual
response rates.
The individual program performance goals identified with
each of the 5 Strategic Goals appear to result in a balanced
approach.
OPM is the Federal Government's personnel office and has
the statutory responsibility and authority to ensure
government-wide adherence to civil service principles and laws.
The performance goals in these areas clearly outline ongoing
and continuing outreach and oversight of Federal agencies. As
outlined above, the objectives of each of the 5 Strategic Goals
clearly show the responsibilities of each division of the
agency in reaching that goal.
ii. data reliability
OPM relies heavily upon the information received from
various surveys, the reliability of which is questionable.
Additional information is provided through the use of outside
audits of various accounts. The plan does not appear to
recognize the potential inadequacies of survey results.
iii. high risk programs
The GAO High-Risk Update issued in January 1999 included a
section regarding basic financial accountability, which noted
that OPM's retirement fund and life insurance fund each
received unqualified audit opinions. This achievement was noted
as a performance result in OPM's fiscal year 2000 Plan.
However, GAO also noted that the revolving funds, health
benefits account, and salaries and expenses account audits
received disclaimers. While none of these audit reports reached
the level of inclusion on the GAO high-risk list, unqualified
audit opinions in these accounts in fiscal year 2000 are
important performance goals (Retirement and Insurance Service
Goal 5).
OPM's fiscal year 2000 Plan contains an update on efforts
to resolve this problem, leading the Subcommittee to conclude
that there is indeed a serious commitment.
iv. consultations
OPM's Strategic Plan was developed in fiscal year 1997 to
span fiscal years 1998 through 2002 as a result of formal and
informal discussions with both authorizing and appropriating
committees of Congress. It is updated annually. Various aspects
of the plan are discussed with the agency representatives
during briefings on the budget request.
Subcommittee staff has noted that requests for expanded
information during budget briefings result in improvements in
the subsequent Strategic Plan update.
OPM has established an integrated GPRA working group
consisting of representatives of each function of the agency.
At last count, there were 24 staff on this permanent working
group.
v. usefulness
While overwhelming in its volume, the performance plan is
set up in a logical and informative manner. Each strategic goal
is listed with references to individual division performance
goals in subsequent pages.
The OPM plan clearly establishes the annual performance
goals, Strategic Plan mission goals, and budget program
activities. However, day-to-day operations are much less
apparent.
The Strategic Plan and performance goals are of great help
in understanding the totality of the responsibilities and
functions of the agency. Of particular usefulness is the
notation of the resources provided for each activity.
Huge responsibilities result in huge explanations. The
combined Strategic Plan/performance plan/budget justification
document is 365 pages long. However, it is difficult to know
how to reduce the size of the document and still be responsive
to the statutory requirements and GAO recommendations.
SUBCOMMITTEE ON VETERANS AFFAIRS AND HOUSING AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT AND
INDEPENDENT AGENCIES
DEPARTMENT OF HOUSING AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT
i. performance goals and measures
The Results Act is an important management tool for the
Department of Housing and Urban Development [HUD], which
continues to face a number of critical management and program
issues that undermine the capacity of the agency to meet its
many program responsibilities.\1\ In particular, HUD is the
principal Federal agency responsible for programs and
activities designed to meet the Nation's housing needs, promote
community development and assist in the economic development of
States and communities. In carrying out these programs and
activities, HUD administers: (1) mortgage and loan insurance
programs that assist families to become homeowners and
facilitate the construction of affordable rental housing; (2)
rental and homeownership subsidy programs, such as the Section
8 and Public Housing programs, that provide rental assistance
for low-income families who otherwise could not afford decent
housing; (3) programs to combat housing discrimination and
which affirmatively further fair housing opportunities; (4)
programs designed to ensure the availability of an adequate
supply of mortgage finance credit; and (5) programs that aid
neighborhood rehabilitation, community and economic
development, and that preserve and revitalize distressed urban
areas.
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\1\ HUD has been designated, most recently in 1999, as a high risk
area by GAO vulnerable to waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement; the
only agency ever designated as high risk on an department-wide basis.
In addition, at various times, GAO, the HUD Inspector General and NAPA
have identified substantial concerns with HUD's ability to administer
its programs.
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Because of HUD's broad and far-reaching responsibilities,
the Results Act is a very important tool for linking housing
and community development programs with funding decisions to
ensure a comprehensive and focused approach to these issues. To
meet the requirements of the Results Act, HUD adopted a 5-year
strategic plan on September 30, 1997, which covered fiscal year
1998 through fiscal year 2003. Since that time, HUD has
continued to refine its strategic planning process through its
business and operating plans and through its annual performance
plans [APPs], with the Fiscal Year 2000 Annual Performance Plan
as its most recent Results Act strategic planning document. And
while the fiscal year 2000 APP reflects a growing
sophistication by the Department in implementing the Results
Act, HUD has not made the necessary connections between the
strategic plan and the allocation of resources, as provided in
HUD's annual budget request. These connections are critical to
ensure that HUD decisionmaking is based on measurable goals and
outputs.
HUD also has been in an almost constant state of
reinvention over the last 6 years, most recently in July, 1997,
when Secretary Cuomo released the HUD 2020 Management Reform
Plan which announced a set of major initiatives, including
changes designed to reduce the number of HUD programs; reduce
the number of staff; reorganize HUD's 81 field offices;
modernize and integrate the financial, management, and data
information systems; and restructure program and activity
authority in a manner designed to integrate more fully HUD
programs and activities.
As part of HUD's reinvention process, HUD contracted with
the National Academy of Public Administration [NAPA] for an
assessment of HUD's implementation of the Results Act. In
response, NAPA issued a report entitled GPRA in HUD: Changes
for the Better (July 1999). While the NAPA report credits HUD
with using the Results Act as a primary tool for management
reform and decisionmaking, the report also raises significant
concerns about HUD's failure to link output data with output
targets in its APPs, including the fiscal year 2000 APP. In
addition, the NAPA report advises that HUD's business and
operating plans still focus on program specific outputs and not
in the multi-disciplinary cross-cutting outcome terms which are
needed to strategically manage HUD. Also, while the Department
is developing a Resource Estimation Allocation Process [REAP]
system to help measure HUD's resource efforts per specific work
requirements, there remain serious concerns regarding the
availability of accurate and timely performance measurement
data which meets sound data quality standards. As a result,
data reliability is an area of paramount concern to the
Congress. Finally, the NAPA report concludes that HUD now needs
to link its management activities more directly to outcomes
included in its strategic and annual performance plans.
ii. consultations
While HUD's progress in implementing the Results Act is
positive, it remains very difficult to assess the degree or the
effectiveness of the Department in implementing the Results
Act. In particular, the fiscal year 2000 APP fails to make
HUD's mission, goals, and objectives adequately outcome-
oriented in a meaningful way and, more importantly, it fails to
make the necessary connection between the APP and funding
decisions, which for the Subcommittee is the primary criteria
for the successful implementation of the Results Act. This also
underlies the Subcommittee's concern that the Department has
not worked adequately with the Congress on the implementation
of the Results Act.
For example, HUD's fiscal year 2000 Budget Justifications
identified 3 performance indicators for the Housing Certificate
Fund, which is the primary appropriation account for the
funding of the Section 8 rental assistance programs. These 3
performance indicators set goals: (1) to increase the
percentage of section 8 families with children living in low-
poverty census tracts; (2) to increase the percentage of the
head of households with children who move from welfare to work
while assisted by tenant-based section 8; and (3) for the
Section 8 Management Assessment program, to improve the
performance of the agencies that administer section 8
assistance. While these issues are important as indicators,
there are larger and more important issues which underlie this
account that need to be addressed. For example, there is
significant evidence that many low-income families with section
8 vouchers have a difficult time in finding (or are unable to
find) affordable and available housing in many areas of the
United States. This is a very significant issue that goes to
the heart of the Section 8 program, one that is as important or
more important than the issues identified by HUD in its
performance indicators.
iii. usefulness
Finally, it is still too early to evaluate adequately the
implementation and usefulness of the Results Act as both a
budget tool and as a measure and benchmark for the
effectiveness of an agency in fulfilling its mission. While
there is a significant disconnect between HUD resource
allocations and program benchmarks and goals, it is only
beginning on March 31, 2000 that agencies are to prepare annual
performance reports covering the preceding 3 fiscal years,
including performance measurement data. At that time HUD is
expected to describe its performance indicators in its
performance plan and assess its performance with respect to
these indicators.
DEPARTMENT OF VETERANS AFFAIRS
The mission of the Department of Veterans Affairs [VA] to
care for and serve veterans is clear, and its performance plan
explicitly describes VA's plans to fulfill that mission. VA
offered consultations with the Subcommittee on its performance
plan; however, its usefulness to the Subcommittee has been
limited, as the budget justification continues to be the key
agency document for the Subcommittee's deliberations regarding
VA programs. Because the budget office is largely responsible
for overseeing implementation of the Results Act, there is a
connection in the development of VA's budget with the
attainment of performance measures.
VA's goals and objectives are results-oriented; the plan
explains where the Department is coordinating with other
agencies, particularly the Department of Defense, in running
its programs. In addition, the plan describes how VA is working
to coordinate better within the Department, acting as ``one
VA'' rather than 3 individual agencies as has been its
tradition.
VA's critical role as a health care provider and benefits
deliverer to veterans makes it quite difficult to withhold
funding owing to poor performance. In fact, poor performance at
the VA often spurs quite the opposite effect: more funding is
often provided when performance lags because interest groups
virtually always cite inadequate funding as the reason for
performance problems, such as poor quality of care or slow
delivery of benefits. This makes it quite difficult for the
Subcommittee to use the budget as a tool to ensure
implementation of a performance-based system at the Department.
Implementation of the Results Act is well underway within
the Veterans Health Administration [VHA], which has undergone a
significant reorganization, including the implementation of
numerous ``management efficiencies'' aimed at reducing
redundancies and improving the use of health care dollars. In
addition, managers are being held to results-oriented
performance measures with retention and promotions at risk.
Hundreds of millions of dollars have been saved over the past
few years while more veterans are being provided health care,
and quality of care indicators have improved. However, given
the size of the system and its decentralization, there is a
wide variety in the degree of ``success.'' Moreover, there
remains much to be done to continue to improve the system,
eliminate inefficiencies, and improve quality. Momentum may be
lagging in eliminating remaining redundancies and in
redirecting savings to health care.
With respect to the Veterans Benefits Administration [VBA],
far more needs to be done to develop a results-oriented system.
VBA has put together a new way of measuring its results--called
``the balanced scorecard''--which moves toward a performance-
based system of measuring its activities. Yet its 59 regional
offices are far from meeting the goals the Department has set
forth, and a culture which has consisted of 59 largely
autonomous regional offices has been slow to adapt to change.
Most of the goals it has set forth are currently not being met
within VBA.
While there is strong support for the Results Act at the
top level within the budget office, continued successful
implementation of GPRA is currently at-risk at the Department
owing to the lack of leadership within the Department and
within VHA.
ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY
The Environmental Protection Agency's [EPA] progress in
implementing the Results Act has been mixed. EPA has taken some
notable steps in attempting to move toward a performance-based
system, such as developing a new system to improve its working
relationship with States, establishing a new Office of
Information aimed at improving the quality of EPA data, and
initiating pilot projects aimed at providing flexibility in
exchange for accountability to regulated entities in meeting
environmental requirements. However, much of EPA's activities
aimed at performance-management have been at the margins of
EPA's activities and have not resulted in changes to core EPA
activities. According to GAO, participants in EPA's ``common
sense'' initiative--the centerpiece of EPA's regulatory
``reinvention'' initiatives--spent much of their time on
process-related issues.
EPA did have multiple consultations with the Subcommittee
as it developed its strategic plan and reoriented its budget
structure, with some useful changes made as a result of these
consultations. The agency also established an Office of
Planning and Analysis, with implementation of GPRA as its key
function. This office reports directly to the Chief Financial
Officer, ensuring a linkage between the budget process and
implementation of the Results Act.
EPA's mission is wide-ranging, and with its responsibility
to implement 12 major environmental statutes, a simple
performance plan would be nearly impossible. Even so, EPA's
performance plan is extremely cumbersome, containing far too
many objectives and sub-objectives. Moreover, a number of its
10 goals are questionable. For example, EPA cites ``a credible
deterrent to pollution'' as one of its 10 goals. Yet most
analysts agree that enforcement should be a policy tool, not a
goal in and of itself.
In addition, it is not clear whether many of EPA's
performance measures are appropriate, and whether these
measures represent a ``stretch'' or whether they would be met
under ``status quo'' circumstances. For example, EPA has a goal
of preventing harmful pesticides exposure, and one of its
measures is a 5 percent decrease in incidences in pesticide
poisonings. Why 5 percent? This is not explained or justified.
In addition, EPA's performance measures are replete with
process-oriented ``bean counts'', such as the number of permits
to be issued. Indeed, only about 12 percent of EPA's
performance measures are true results-oriented measures. Moving
to true performance measures is difficult because, as EPA
acknowledges in its annual plan, factors other than EPA
activities--such as State and local agency activities--often
play a direct role in whether performance measures are met. In
the limited instances where EPA uses true performance measures
as opposed to traditional bean counts, it is not at all clear
that EPA activities can be linked directly to the performance
measures it has set forth. Also, assessing the effectiveness of
its activities has not been one of EPA's strong points as the
agency lacks a program evaluation capability.
With respect to data reliability, as mentioned earlier EPA
has taken the first step of establishing a new Office of
Information. However, the quality of information continues to
be a major management weakness identified by the Inspector
General, and far more needs to be done to ensure that the data
EPA uses to measure its effectiveness are accurate and
reliable. This will be a multi-year effort and will require
significant action on the part of State environmental agencies
as well.
EPA's budget process illustrates the difficulties EPA has
had in implementing the Results Act in a meaningful manner. On
the one hand, EPA has taken significant steps to link its
budget with its strategic plan. Beginning in fiscal year 1999,
EPA restructured its entire budget process consistent with its
strategic plan, including in the budget justification
appropriation requests for each of the myriad goals, objectives
and sub-objectives. Yet in restructuring the budget, key
program information has been lost and must be obtained through
a series of complicated budget crosscuts. Unfortunately, the
usefulness of the budget document has declined because
appropriation decisions are made primarily on the basis of
program information rather than objectives and sub-objectives.
Moreover, attributing agency program activity to sub-objectives
is an inexact and subjective process. EPA admitted that ``the
resources under each goal do not and cannot reflect all
resources that could be reasonably associated with achieving
the goal.''
And, the new budget process has not resulted in any
significant change in the allocation of EPA resources to ensure
that dollars are allocated to those activities yielding the
largest results--the largest reduction in risk to human health
and the environment. The strategic plan does not address the
need to prioritize activities according to risk, despite the
fact that this has been an issue of chief concern to this
Subcommittee.
Finally, one of the largest EPA programs, the Federal toxic
waste cleanup program known as Superfund, continues to be
designated by GAO as a high-risk program subject to fraud,
waste and abuse. It has held this designation for a decade,
despite EPA claims that it has reformed the program. EPA's
performance plan does not directly address the key problems
identified by GAO, such as the need to control Superfund
contractor cleanup costs.
FEDERAL EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY
The Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA] has made
some important strides in moving toward a performance-based
system as envisioned by the Results Act, including
``reengineering'' its public assistance program to streamline
the process by which disaster relief funds are allocated for
municipal infrastructure projects, and implementing a new
teleregistration process for providing benefits to disaster
victims. These initiatives are resulting in lower
administrative costs and improved customer satisfaction.
However, FEMA has not linked its budget to its strategic
plan, and it is not clear how the development of FEMA's budget
would be impacted if performance measures are not met. The
Agency's budget staff is not involved in preparation of the
annual plan or oversight of the Results Act. Moreover, there
continue to be significant concerns with the management and
allocation of FEMA's disaster relief fund, such as whether
hazard mitigation grant funds are being spent on the most cost-
effective projects.
FEMA's goals and measures are results-oriented and seem to
be reasonably challenging. FEMA is working to improve its
information systems, an area of concern identified by the IG.
FEMA is expanding the use of information systems to capture
performance information to help manage its programs. While FEMA
does identify activities that cut across other Federal
agencies, it does not address the need to eliminate duplication
in such areas as anti-terrorism and hazard mitigation.
The plan does address major management challenges, and
FEMA's efforts to implement improvements in such areas as
developing disaster declaration criteria are commendable.
However, while FEMA has proposed using emergency management
performance grants as the means of providing pre-disaster
assistance to States--a more flexible and streamlined means of
providing this assistance than the traditional multi-grant
process--it is not clear that FEMA is doing enough to hold
States accountable in the use of these funds, e.g., improving
their preparedness for disaster events. Also, while FEMA
acknowledges that disaster cost containment is a key concern
and has taken some steps to reduce costs, it has not done
enough in this area. The fundamental mission of FEMA's disaster
relief program as envisioned by the Stafford Disaster Relief
Act is to supplement, and not supplant, State and local
capability. The strategic plan and annual plan do not
adequately affirm this or address the need to limit FEMA's role
to a supplemental one.
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION [NASA]
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration [NASA] is
making good progress in implementing the Results Act. Beginning
in October 1996, NASA issued a Strategic Management Handbook
which documented management policies, procedures, guidelines
and the responsibility for strategic management. The first
Strategic Plan was issued in September 1997 and covered fiscal
year 1998 through fiscal year 2002. Subsequently, NASA issued
Annual Performance Plans [APP] for both fiscal year 1999 and
2000. In each case NASA has made progress in effectively
implementing the Results Act.
Nevertheless, there is still progress to be made, and in
many ways, it is premature to evaluate adequately the
implementation and usefulness of the Results Act as both a
budget tool and as a benchmark to measure the effectiveness of
NASA in meeting its mission. A number of these concerns will be
addressed on March 31, 2000, when agencies are required to
submit annual performance reports covering the preceding 3
fiscal years, including performance measurement data.
In addition, the Subcommittee believes a recent GAO report
on NASA's Fiscal Year 1999 APP as well as an audit by NASA's
Inspector General on NASA's implementation of the Results Act
remain useful and accurate assessments of the strengths and
weaknesses of NASA's implementation of the Results Act. In
brief, NASA's APP reflect NASA's mission statement and goals as
stated in its strategic plan, and link strategic goals with
NASA's performance plans' goals and performance targets;
incorporate performance measures that are generally objective,
able to be quantified, and useful for assessing progress in
meeting the APP performance objectives; and provide for annual
external reviews by the Advisory Council and semiannual
internal reviews by the Senior Management Council to validate
NASA's progress in meeting its goals and objectives.\2\
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\2\ The NASA IG indicates that the Senior Management Council did
not assess NASA progress in achieving the established goals and targets
until August 1999. The IG advises that the Council assessments need to
occur earlier and that NASA needs to establish formal procedures and
schedules to ensure that assessments are accomplished in a timely
manner.
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On the other hand, NASA's annual performance plans must
better connect performance goals and measures to the program
activities in NASA's budget; more fully explain NASA's
procedures for verifying and validating the data used to assess
performance to ensure that the data is accurate, complete and
credible; and provide more insight into the development of
NASA's goals and performance measures. NASA also needs to work
more closely with the Congress in implementing the Results Act.
In particular, the Senate Committee on Appropriations needs to
be consulted on the implementation of the Results Act since the
primary criteria for its successful implementation is the
connection between NASA's strategic plan and the APP to
resource allocation, as provided in NASA's annual budget
request.
Moreover, NASA is converting its budget to full cost
accounting by fiscal year 2001. This revised accounting
structure should provide more clarity to the budget process and
resource allocation. However, the principles of full cost
accounting must be tied into the Results Act procedures.
Finally, NASA has traditionally used performance-based
decisionmaking in the development of NASA's many highly
technical and specific deliverables (from satellites to space
shuttles to new propulsion systems). The more difficult issue
is how NASA can use the Results Act to match the often highly
uncertain research and development goals with a process that is
intended to link funds expended today with an outcome that may
not occur for a decade or more.
NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
The National Science Foundation [NSF] has made significant
progress in implementing the Results Act, in spite of difficult
challenges in developing performance outcomes that are
measurable due to the nature of the agency's mission of
advancing basic scientific research and promoting education in
science and math. The Fiscal Year 2000 Annual Performance Plan
lists five outcome goals, which are generally consistent with
the mission of the agency: (1) discoveries at and across the
frontier of science and engineering; (2) connections between
discoveries and their use in service to society; (3) a diverse,
globally-oriented workforce of scientists and engineers; (4)
improved achievement in mathematics and science skills needed
by all Americans; and (5) relevant, timely information on the
national and international science and engineering enterprise.
Despite the challenge in developing performance
measurements, NSF has made significant progress in meeting the
goals of the Results Act by using more qualitative performance
goals instead of quantitative performance targets.
Specifically, NSF, as permitted by the GPRA statute,
established performance goals in the form of statements that
describe ``successful'' and ``minimally effective''
performance. The use of this alternative format allows for
expert judgment, i.e., expert peer review, to consider both
quantitative and qualitative information on performance. The
scientific community strongly believes in this approach since
many believe that outcomes of basic research cannot be captured
by quantitative measures alone.
Reviews by the Congressional Research Service and GAO have
generally praised the Foundation's efforts in developing its
performance plan, but both have pointed out the need for
further improvement in order for the plan to be useful to
policy-makers. Two of the major deficiencies in NSF's plan are:
(1) NSF's failure to provide clear information on the linkages
between its budget and its performance goals, and (2) limited
confidence that the information it provides will be credible.
Resolving the first deficiency will be of special interest to
the Subcommittee since it is important to understand the
rationale for how NSF's resources contribute to accomplishing
the expected level of performance.
IV. PROGRAM DUPLICATION AND OVERLAP
In order to ensure that Federal taxpayers get the most
``bang for their buck,'' not only must Congress and the
Administration ensure that programs achieve their desired goals
through measurable performance objectives, but they must
eliminate duplication of effort. Unfortunately, for a variety
of reasons, many Federal programs perform essentially the same
function.
For example, the Rural Development Administration, through
the Rural Community Advancement Program \1\, operates a water
and sewer improvement program in isolated Native villages in
Alaska and remote colonias along the United States-Mexico
border. The Environmental Protection Agency runs nearly
identical programs through its State and Tribal Assistance
Grants Program.\2\ Both agencies require a 25 percent local
match and have similar program requirements.
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\1\ The Fiscal Year 2000 Agriculture and Related Agencies
Appropriations Act provided $20,000,000. Title III of H. Rept. 106-354.
\2\ The Fiscal Year 2000 Housing and Urban Affairs, Veterans, and
Related Agencies Appropriations Act provided $30,000,000. H. Rept. 106-
379.
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The good news is that double the resources have been
dedicated to provide running water and flush toilets for a
forgotten segment of Americans. The bad news is that two
separate agencies are running the same program with two sets of
rules, two sets of applications required, two sets of personnel
processing paperwork, and two sets of reporting requirements.
The Indian Health Service also provides resources for rural
water and sewer programs, as does the Army Corps of Engineers.
Fortunately, at least in Alaska, the Federal agencies have
worked together with the State of Alaska to form a Village Safe
Water Program which administers all the funds once they are
transferred to Alaska. One priority list is established, and
projects are funded off that list regardless of which agency
provides the funds. Unfortunately, two agencies still must
process the paperwork to make it work, while a third, the
Indian Health Service, helps implement the program.
An even more glaring example arises with respect to housing
programs. The Department of Housing and Urban Development [HUD]
is the lead agency responsible for providing affordable housing
in the nation.\3\ Yet, over the years a number of other
agencies have assumed segments of that mission. For example,
the Veterans Department operates the Veterans Housing Benefit
Program, an indirect and guaranteed loan program, a Native
American Veterans Housing Loan Program, and a Guaranteed
Transitional Housing Loan Program for veterans \4\ of the Armed
Forces that mirror HUD programs. In addition, the Rural
Development Administration, an arm of the Department of
Agriculture, operates the Rural Housing Service, a
$4,600,000,000 housing loan program.\5\ The Department of
Defense has a separate military housing program.
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\3\ The Fiscal Year 2000 Housing and Urban Development, Veterans
Department, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act provided
$11,376,695,000 for housing activities.
\4\ H. Rept. 106-379.
\5\ The total subsidy required to support the program in fiscal
year 2000 is $181,560,000. Conference Report on the Fiscal Year 2000
Agriculture and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, H. Rept. 106-354.
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With respect to homeless programs alone, there are 50
separate programs run by 8 different Federal agencies according
to GAO.\6\ A February 1999 GAO Report noted that:
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\6\ United States General Accounting Office Report to Congressional
Committees, February 1999. ``Homelessness: Coordination and Evaluation
of Program are Essential'', page 2.
``in some cases, programs operated by more than one
agency offer the same type of service. For example, 23
programs operated by four agencies offer housing, such
as emergency shelter, transitional housing, and other
housing assistance. Twenty-six programs administered by
six agencies offer food and nutrition services,
including food stamps, school lunch subsidies, and
supplements for food banks.'' \7\
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\7\ Id.
Some programs have separate eligibility criteria, separate
intake workers, separate personnel to process applications, and
separate rules and regulations. So instead of providing
services to the homeless, the Federal Government spends a
substantial portion of its resources providing resources for
paper pushing.
Economic development offers yet another example. The
Commerce Department's Economic Administration \8\ is very
similar to HUD's Economic Development Initiative.\9\ A similar
program, the Rural Business-Cooperative Service, only with a
rural flavor, can be found within the Rural Development
Administration.\10\ Both the Department of Housing and Urban
Affairs \11\ and the Department of Agriculture \12\ offer
enterprise zone programs, and the Small Business Administration
funds Hub Zones.
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\8\ The Economic Development Administration was funded at
$361,879,000 in the Fiscal Year 2000 Commerce, Justice, State, the
Judiciary, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act. H. Rept. 106-398.
\9\ The Economic Development Initiative was funded at $275,000,000
in the Fiscal Year 2000 Housing and Urban Development, Veterans
Affairs, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act. H. Rept. 106-379.
\10\ The Rural Business-Cooperative Service was funded at
$16,615,000 which supports a loan program of $38,256,000 for fiscal
year 2000. H.Rept. 106-354.
\11\ The Fiscal Year 2000 Housing and Urban Development, Veterans
Affairs, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act provided $55,000,000
for urban empowerment zones and $15,000,000 for rural empowerment zones
which was transferred to the Secretary of Agriculture.
\12\ The Fiscal Year 2000 Agriculture, Rural Development, and
Related Agencies Appropriations Act provided $45,245,000 for
empowerment zones, enterprise communities, and Rural Economic Area
Partnership Zones.
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Why do these duplications occur? Because both Congress and
the Administration want to do what is right. When the 1996 Farm
Bill came to the Senate floor, the Alaska Congressional
Delegation amended it to ensure that rural Alaska received the
same treatment as the colonias. When the Environmental
Protection Agency was reauthorized along with its urban water
and sewer program, the border States amended the bill to make
sure that their unique needs received the same treatment as
urban locales.
Likewise, with respect to homeless programs, the
proliferation of programs came out of a strong desire by both
branches of Government to help homeless people. The
Administration looks for every opportunity, both in the Federal
budget process and as agency programs are reauthorized, to
ensure that a particular issue like homelessness receives
attention. Members of Congress, depending on their committee
assignments, look for similar opportunities. A member of the
Appropriations Committee might approach homelessness one way
while a member of the Veterans Affairs Committee may focus on
homelessness among veterans, while the Indian Affairs Committee
may focus on Native housing programs. All have the best of
intentions.
This phenomenon reached its zenith with respect to job
training programs. Before the recent and massive
reorganization, there were over 200 separate job training
programs in nearly every agency of the Government.\13\ All, no
doubt, were good ideas at the time and when considered in
isolation. But in the aggregate, the system made no sense at
all.
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\13\ Pub. L. 105-220, the Workforce Investment Partnership Act of
1998.
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The Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee
undertook a major overhaul of Federal job training programs,
with the support of and in cooperation with the Administration,
and consolidated them into one stop job services. Instead of
visiting dozens of job training programs or even bouncing from
program to program, a person seeking training now makes only
one visit to access all Federal job training programs.
Resources can now be focused on training instead of
bureaucracy.
This model should be used in other areas where collective
efforts to do right have gone very wrong. For example, the
internet and other high technology solutions have become the
hot new trend in providing both health and educational
services. A virtual bidding war has ensued to see which branch
can do more in these rapidly emerging fields.
Dozens of Federal agencies now provide such services
including the Distance Learning and Telemedicine Program in the
Department of Agriculture \14\, the Public Telecommunications
and Facilities Program within the Department of Commerce \15\,
the Coast Guard health program within the Department of
Transportation, the Veterans Department,\16\ the Indian Health
Service,\17\ the Department of Health and Human Services, the
Department of Defense \18\, and even independent agencies like
the Federal Communications Commission's schools and libraries
program.
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\14\ The Distance Learning and Telemedicine Program was funded at
$20,700,000 in the Fiscal Year 2000 Agriculture, Rural Development, and
Related Agencies Appropriations Act. H. Rept. 105-354.
\15\ The Public Telecommunications Facilities, Planning and
Construction Program was funded at $26,500,000 in the Fiscal Year 2000
Commerce, Justice, State, the Judiciary, and Related Agencies
Appropriations Act. H.Rept. 106-398.
\16\ The Veterans Administration budget included $750,000 to
develop a telemedicine network for veterans. H. Rept. 106-379.
\17\ The Indian Health Service budget included $5,500,000 to
develop a telemedicine network for Indians. H. Rept. 106-406.
\18\ The Department of Defense budget included $3,800,000 to
develop a telemedicine network for members of the Armed Services. H.
Rept. 106-244.
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There is tremendous duplication of effort, both within
departments and even within single agencies. There are 174
education programs just within the Department of Education. The
President has proposed eliminating 18 of those programs when
the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is reauthorized, but
adding 19 more. One of those 174 education programs awarded
grants to nearly a dozen separate graduate equivalent degree
[GED] programs to enable high school drop-outs to earn their
high school diplomas through the internet. If the programs are
universally available on the internet, how many GED programs do
we need?
In Alaska, this issue is being addressed in two ways.
Senator Ted Stevens, Chairman of the Senate Appropriations
Committee, advised his constituents that Congress would provide
no money for telehealth in Alaska unless all the interested
parties worked together to develop one statewide initiative.
Prior to that, telemedicine projects were developing across the
State with no rhyme nor reason. For example, in the remote
community of Dutch Harbor, two separate and competing
telehealth clinics were built in a town of 1,000 people while
other communities had no clinic at all.
With a $100,000 planning grant, the State Commissioner of
Health and Social Services, Karen Perdue, worked with all
affected Federal, State, and local agencies and private
caregivers to develop a comprehensive, unified statewide
telemedicine network. It is being funded through the 4 Federal
agencies whose clients will benefit from Coast Guardsmen to
veterans to Indians to servicemen and women. But one agency is
administering the program.
A similar effort is currently underway in Alaska to develop
one statewide teleeducation network which will include local
school districts, all colleges and universities in the State,
the National Guard, the Department of Defense, and various
segments such as hospitals which require a training component
to make their programs function.
To maximize economies of scale, this effort must become a
national initiative. The Senate Health, Education, Labor, and
Pensions Committee plans to require a comprehensive approach in
its reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education
Act. Chairman Jim Jeffords should be commended for his
foresight in developing this legislation, which will make the
full range of services available to every American and will do
so in a much more cost effective way.
Alaska has worked to save money by consolidating other
services. For example, Indian Health Service clinics in rural
Alaska provide medical care to veterans and are reimbursed by
the VA, assist poor people and are reimbursed by Medicaid,
provide health care to the elderly and are reimbursed by
Medicare. Similarly, the Department of Defense, working in
conjunction with the Veterans Department, reserved 10 beds in
its new regional medical hospital for Alaska's veterans who had
no hospital to make specialty medical care affordable.
Another effort underway in the State's capital city of
Fairbanks would consolidate Federal, State, and social service
delivery mechanisms. One-stop shopping centers would be
established for parents and their children. One case worker
would provide access to whatever services were needed from
child care assistance to Head Start to immunizations to
nutrition counselling. One common application form would be
used to avoid multiple agencies processing multiple
applications.
To assist in this effort to consolidate social services,
the Senate Appropriations Committee included a provision in the
Fiscal Year 2000 Treasury and General Government Appropriations
Act \19\ directing OMB to submit an inventory of grant programs
to the Committee along with relevant eligibility guidelines.
That information will assist in the effort to consolidate
programs, or at a minimum, consolidate their administration.
The Women, Infants, and Children's Program is a good model.
Case workers not only provide nutrition services and
counseling, but access to immunizations, lead screening, and
other services for babies and young children.
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\19\ Section 515 provides: ``The Director of the Office of
Management and Budget shall prepare an inventory of existing Federal
grant programs including formula funds, competitive grant funds, block
grant funds, and direct payments. The inventory shall include the name
of the program, a copy of the relevant statutory and regulatory
guidelines, the funding level in fiscal year 1999, a list of
eligibility criteria both statutory and regulatory, and a copy of the
application form. The Director shall submit an inventory no later than
6 months after enactment to the Committee on Appropriations and
relevant authorizing committees.''
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More needs to be done. The new President will have a
tremendous opportunity to make recommendations to Congress to
eliminate duplication, consolidate programs, and form
interagency collaborative partnerships to streamline
administration and maximize coordination. With the support of
Congress, services could be improved, duplication eliminated or
at least reduced, and more Federal resources could be devoted
to providing services. The taxpayers deserve no less.
V. OBSERVATIONS AND CONCLUSION
Observations
Successful implementation of the Results Act depends upon a
transformation in the methods used by the Executive and
Legislative branches to formulate and evaluate budget requests
for Federal agencies. Because implementation is an evolutionary
process, this report assesses only the current cycle in which
performance plans were delivered to Congress in conjunction
with the President's fiscal year 2000 budget. As this report
illustrates, the quality and usefulness of the performance plan
is directly impacted by the following factors: (1) the quality
of the agency's goals and measures; (2) an agency's
vulnerability to external factors in achieving its goals; (3)
the accuracy of agency data; (4) agency responsiveness to GAO
and Congressional concerns and/or recommendations, such as GAO
high risk areas; (5) the quality and frequency of the
consultation process between the agency and Congressional
staff; and (6) the commitment of agency staff to comply with
the Results Act's requirements. A brief discussion of these
factors follows.
The quality of the agencies' goals and objectives varies
both among agencies and within a single agency. For example,
the Department of Justice performance plan for fiscal year 2000
outlines 3 strategic themes. The Subcommittee evaluation
determined that some aspects of the plan are stronger than
others. An uneven performance plan results in uneven agency
performance. Across agencies, the Department of Agriculture
generally presented clear, realistic goals that were capable of
measurement. On the other hand, the goals for USAID were
evaluated as ``too ambiguous to lend themselves to credible
evaluations of success or measurement of benchmarks toward that
success.'' Similarly, the performance indicators for the
International Trade Commission did not include quality control
mechanisms. The usefulness of an agency performance plan to the
Appropriations Committee is commensurate with its clarity,
reliability and goal achievability. The Appropriations
Committee anticipates that the performance plans will improve
with subsequent budget submissions as the agencies benefit from
performance plan evaluations by Congress, GAO, other entities,
and the agency itself.
A performance plan is only as reliable as the agency's
information sources and data reliability. Likewise, a
performance plan is useful to the Appropriations Committee only
if it is based on reliable data. In most performance plans,
data reliability was described as a major agency concern. For
example, with respect to DOD data, the Defense Subcommittee
expressed concern for ``the credibility of data from DOD's
financial, accounting, and other information systems.'' The
Interior Subcommittee noted that DOI and several bureaus within
its purview ``are attempting in several instances to upgrade or
modify information systems in order to better support their
performance plans.'' Improved data reliability requires the
allocation of adequate resources in the agency budget process
and careful consideration of the requested funds during the
appropriations process.
Most Federal departments and agencies are at a disadvantage
in achieving their stated goals because they are highly
vulnerable to outside influences. For example, the Department
of State faces a challenge in developing dependable performance
measures because American foreign policy is subject to the
actions of other nations, transnational organizations and
international business.
Imperative to the success of the Results Act is the
consultation process between Federal agencies and Congressional
staff. There is no substitute for dialogue to ensure that
information is both shared and explained to the satisfaction of
the Committee prior to the passage of the appropriations bill.
Since time is a precious commodity for both agency and
Congressional staff, consultation should occur simultaneous
with the agency's presentation of its budget request. This
coordinated effort will encourage the integration of the
Results Act with the budget process and facilitate an
understanding of the link between performance plans and budget
requests.
The Results Act is a tool for Federal agencies, Congress
and other entities that use Results Act information in making
funding or other agency-related decisions. Thus, the agency's
responsiveness to Congressional, GAO or other entity concerns
is critical to the success of the Results Act. The high risk
areas GAO has identified in many Federal agencies are examples
of the types of problems the Results Act was designed to
prevent or eliminate. Within the Department of the Interior,
GAO has highlighted several management problems that cost the
Federal Government and American taxpayers over $3,800,000,000.
An agency's performance plan should provide goals and measures
for remedying any verifiable high risk area.
An obvious key to the success of the Results Act is
compliance with the Act's requirements. For example, timely
delivery of the required performance plans ensures that the
Subcommittee staff will have ample opportunity to review and
use the information. The plan itself should contain the
information the Act was designed to elicit, and the information
should be presented in a clear and usable format. Compliance is
evidence of an agency's commitment to the Results Act and the
goal of performance-based governance.
Conclusion
The Senate Appropriations Committee, like the Federal
agencies, has begun to integrate performance plans into the
appropriations process to provide adequate funding for those
programs and projects properly within the jurisdiction of the
Federal Government. This integration is an ongoing process, and
its success depends largely on the quality of information
contained in the performance plans and performance reports. The
Committee has and will continue to monitor agency compliance
with the Results Act in an ongoing effort to streamline
agencies and eliminate waste, thereby achieving efficiencies
within the Federal Government. The robust economy will not
deter the Committee in this endeavor. As David M. Walker,
Comptroller General, testified before the Senate Budget
Committee on February 1, 2000:
``* * * [E]ven if the budget surplus continues, it
does not signal the end of fiscal challenges. Nor does
it eliminate the need for prudent stewardship of our
national economy. Projected surpluses do not absolve
government of its responsibility to make good use of
taxpayer dollars.''
Only through a continued Congressional commitment to
holding Federal agencies accountable to performance-based
budgeting can the goals of continued prosperity and an
efficient, effective Federal Government be achieved.
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