Results Act

The Government Performance and Results Act is intended to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of federal programs by requiring each agency to establish performance measurement systems that include strategic plans, annual performance plans, and annual reports on its programs' performance. Since the Results Act was passed, the Energy Department has taken several steps, including the development of a strategic management system to align its planning, budgeting, and evaluation processes and the adoption of performance-based management contracts as a way to manage the work at its facilities. This report reviews DOE's early efforts to implement the act. GAO evaluates how well (1) DOE's program and field units linked their subordinate plans to the departmental strategic plan and (2) DOE linked the goals of its strategic plan to its annual performance plan and the goals for its performance-based management and operating contracts.

GAO noted that: (1) subordinate strategic and multiyear plans prepared by DOE's programs, field offices, and contractors are not clearly linked to the goals, objectives, and strategies of the Department's strategic plan; (2) although DOE's Strategic Management System guidance provides a basic outline of the planning process, it does not provide clear directions on how these subordinate plans should be linked to DOE's strategic plan; (3) additionally, DOE formed its Strategic Management System around its business lines and its organizations are not aligned with the business lines; (4) for example, DOE has three main program offices--Defense Programs, Energy Research, and Environmental Management--whose work is done through various field organizations and management and operating contractors; (5) as a result, these different program offices and their supporting organizations often contribute to the fulfillment of the same business lines through a variety of different, complex, crosscutting relationships; (6) DOE, in its first annual performance plan under the Results Act, links the annual performance plan's goals and measures to those in the strategic plan; (7) DOE also provides a description of how budgetary resources are linked to its strategic goals; (8) however, the annual performance plan could be more useful if it described how the requested budgetary resources are linked to the annual performance goals in the plan; (9) in addition, DOE did not incorporate the approved performance goals and incentive fees in its performance-based management and operating contracts--accounting for 70 percent of DOE's obligations--until after the start of the current fiscal year and after the contractors had already begun their work; (10) the goals and incentive fees agreed to in these contracts are intended to guide and enhance the contractors' performance; and (11) not incorporating the goals and incentive fees until after the contractors begin work reduces the usefulness of performance-based contracting.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

Director: Team: Phone: