Managing for Results

The Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 seeks to shift government's focus from activities to results or outcomes. The Act requires agencies to produce annual performance plans to inform Congress and the public of the annual performance goals for their major programs and activities, the measures that will be use to gauge performance, the strategies and resources required to achieve those goals, and the procedures that will be used to verify and validate performance information. This report provides summary information based on GAO's review and evaluation of the fiscal year 2000 performance plans of the 24 agencies covered by the Chief Financial Officers Act. GAO discusses the extent to which the agencies' plans included three key elements of informative performance plans: (1) clear pictures of intended performance, (2) specific discussions of strategies and resources, and (3) confidence that performance information will be credible. GAO also identifies the degree of improvement the fiscal year 2000 performance plans represent over the fiscal year 1999 plans.

GAO noted that: (1) on the whole, agencies' FY 2000 performance plans show moderate improvements over the FY 1999 plans and contain better information and perspective; (2) however, key weaknesses remain, and important opportunities exist to improve future plans; (3) the plans provide general pictures of intended performance across the agencies suggesting that important opportunities for continued improvements still remain to be addressed; (4) while all the plans include baseline and trend data for at least some of their goals and measures, inconsistent attention is given to resolving mission-critical management challenges and program risks; (5) these management challenges and program risks continue to seriously undermine the federal government's performance and to leave it vulnerable to billions of dollars in waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement; (6) agencies could also provide clearer pictures of intended performance by providing greater attention to crosscutting program issues; (7) coordinating crosscutting programs is important because mission fragmentation and program overlap are widespread across the federal government; (8) most agencies' plans show some improvement in their recognition of crosscutting program efforts; (9) however, few plans attempt the more challenging tasks of discussing planned strategies for coordination and establishing complementary performance goals and common or complementary performance measures; (10) continued progress on this issue is important because GAO has found that unfocused and uncoordinated crosscutting programs waste scarce funds, confuse and frustrate program customers, and limit overall program effectiveness; (11) crosscutting programs involve more than one agency, and coordination therefore requires the ability to look across agencies and ensure that the appropriate coordination is taking place; (12) agencies' discussions of how resources and strategies will be used to achieve results show mixed progress; (13) some agencies show progress in making useful linkages between their budget requests and performance goals, while other agencies are not showing the necessary progress; (14) the continuing lack of confidence that performance information will be credible is also a source of major concern; (15) many agencies offer only limited indications that performance data will be credible; and (16) the inattention to ensuring that performance data will be sufficiently timely, complete, accurate, useful, and consistent is an important weakness in the performance plans.

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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