Rep. Young and Rep. Burton's letter to agency heads

DAILY BRIEFING

Rep. Young and Rep. Burton's letter to agency heads

Dear Secretary:

The General Accounting Office and your inspector general recently provided Congress with reports on the most serious fraud, waste, mismanagement, and performance problems facing your agency. Their reports are enclosed. The problems they identified are based on extensive, and often recurring, audit work. These problems waste millions, if not billions, of tax dollars each year and undermine your agency's ability to perform the basic functions that our citizens need and legitimately demand from it.

We, as Chairmen of the House Committee with broad oversight over government management practices, and the House Committee that funds all government agencies, plan to work together to make sure that the most serious problems facing our government are being addressed appropriately.

Most of these problems have been documented many times before. The purpose of this letter is not to call them to your attention once more, since you should already be thoroughly familiar with them. Rather, we write to inform you of our intention to target these problems during the 1O6th Congress.

Many laws enacted in recent years give agencies the tools needed to address these problems-and give Congress and the American people the ability to hold agencies accountable for achieving results. The most important is the Government Performance and Results Act, popularly know as the "Results Act." We expect you to use these tools vigorously during the next two years to address your problems; you can be assured that we will also use them vigorously to assess your agency's performance. Specifically:

• We expect you to adopt firm commitments to address your agency's problem areas in your annual Results Act performance plans through specific and measurable annual performance targets. We don't expect you to solve the most serious problems overnight. What we do expect are commitments that set a clear course to resolving each problem as soon as practical, with measurable road marks of progress along the way, for which you will be accountable.
• You can expect to be asked about your problem areas, and your efforts to address them, in connection with your appropriations requests this year. Among other things, we will explore where your agency stands in implementing GAO and IG audit recommendations directed at these problems.
• Where we find a lack of adequate commitment or specific action to address the problem areas, you can expect to see the results in our funding decisions. We simply are unwilling to subsidize wasteful, inefficient, or ineffective programs and activities where no serious effort is being made to fix them.

Sincerely,

Bill Young, Chairman
Committee on Appropriations

Dan Burton, Chairman
Committee on Government Reform