Need for a Government-Wide Budget Classification Structure for Federal Research and Development Information

There is a need for a unified presentation of Federal Research and Development (R&D) budgetary information according to defineable user patterns. An agency-wide structure for the Department of Housing and Urban Development contributed to the development of a conceptual foundation for the Government-wide structure. The Unified Classification Structure for Federal Research and Development. The categories in the structure have been designed to identify specific national objectives which are of concern or interest to Congress. The proposed structure will be a supplementary categorization of total funding for all research by national objective. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) stated that a useful course of action would be to develop some limited supplementary R&D data on an interagency basis to cover specific problem areas identified by Congress, thus avoiding the collection of too much data. OMB also stated that the GAO system would cause more work for the agencies and OMB and would lead to arbitrary classifications.

Information satisfying the need for unified funding information should enable users to determine the level of commitment to specific national objectives, to ascertain the interrelationships among different agencies' R&D activities, to facilitate identifying areas where more effective coordination is necessary, and to evaluate whether research funding is in line with priorities. Existing information sources do not provide readily usable information identifying the level of R&D funding by agency committed to specific national objectives.

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.

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