GPRA

Congress intended for the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) to fundamentally shift the focus of federal managers from processes to outcomes and results. In crafting GPRA, Congress recognized that if federal managers were to be held accountable for achieving results, they would need the authority and flexibility to achieve those results. GPRA provides for a series of pilot projects so that federal agencies can gain experience in using the act's provisions and provide lessons to other agencies before GPRA's implementation governmentwide, which is scheduled to begin in the fall of 1997. One set of these GPRA projects focused on managerial accountability and flexibility. This report (1) determines whether the managerial accountability and flexibility pilot worked as intended and the reasons why it did or did not and (2) identifies the lessons learned from this pilot and their possible implications for the governmentwide implementation of GPRA.

GAO noted that: (1) the GPRA managerial accountability and flexibility pilot did not work as intended; (2) the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) did not designate any of the 7 departments and 1 independent agency that submitted a total of 61 waiver proposals as GPRA managerial accountability and flexibility pilots; (3) three major factors contributed to the failure of GPRA's managerial accountability and flexibility pilot phase to work as intended; (4) first, changes in federal management practices and laws that occurred after GPRA was enacted affected agencies' need for the GPRA process; (5) second, GPRA was not the only means by which agencies could receive waivers from administrative requirements, and thereby obtain needed managerial flexibility; (6) third, OMB did not work actively with agencies that were seeking to take part in the managerial accountability and flexibility pilot, in contrast to its more proactive posture toward other GPRA requirements, such as the pilots for the performance planning and reporting requirements; (7) overall, officials in five of the eight agencies that submitted a waiver proposal to OMB said that they never received: (a) feedback from OMB on the status of their waiver proposals; (b) notification of specific concerns that OMB may have had about the quality and scope of the proposals; or, most important, (c) explicit instructions from OMB on how their proposals could be improved to better meet OMB's expectations; (8) even though the pilot process did not result in any GPRA-authorized waivers and thus did not work as intended, the process provided lessons for agencies and may have important implications for governmentwide GPRA implementation; (9) while preparing their waiver requests, several participating agencies learned that the burdens and constraints that confronted their managers often were imposed by the agency itself or its parent department and were not the result of requirements imposed by central management agencies; (10) the administration's effort to develop federal management "templates" that, in part, document the range of flexibility agencies have under existing central management agency requirements is a promising means for disseminating knowledge about available flexibility among federal agencies; and (11) in addition, the pilot experience should provide useful information for Congress to consider as GPRA is implemented governmentwide.

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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