Congressional Republicans used part of their free time during the recent holiday season to put pressure on the Clinton administration to tailor agencies' fiscal 1999 budget and performance plans to satisfy the GOP's vision of the Government Performance and Results Act.
In a Dec. 17 letter to Office of Management and Budget Director Franklin Raines, the House leadership let the administration know what it would like to see in the first governmentwide performance plan.
While the Results Act calls on the administration to develop such a plan for fiscal 1999, describing the goals of the federal government's major programs, the House leaders' letter says the plan should also identify overlap among agencies and address major management problems, including year 2000 conversion. In addition, the House leaders cited a March 4, 1995 memorandum from President Clinton directing agencies to change their regulatory focus from process and punishment to results. "OMB should describe in the governmentwide plan how it and the agencies have implemented this direction," the GOP letter said.
The Results Act also directs agencies to develop individual performance plans for 1999. Such plans must be "user-friendly," the GOP leaders wrote. "Performance plans should provide a complete and clear picture of what an agency intends to accomplish with a given level of resources," the letter said. "However, the plans should not be so voluminous as to overwhelm, rather than inform, the reader."
The letter also called on agencies to construct their performance plans in a way that makes it easy for congressional committees to compare agencies' goals to their budget requests. It also instructed agencies to address overlapping programs and major management problems in their performance plans.
The House leaders reminded Raines in the letter that agencies' performance evaluations for fiscal 1999 are due by March 31, 2000.
"We need to be able to answer the fundamental Results Act question: What is the federal government accomplishing?" the letter said.
Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., has also introduced a bill that would make changes to the Results Act. The bill, H.R. 2883, would require agencies to rewrite and resubmit their strategic plans by Sept. 30, 1998. Burton and other GOP leaders said they were disappointed with agencies' original strategic plans, which were submitted last September.
The bill would add additional requirements to agencies' strategic and performance plans, including a description of overlapping programs and major management problems. Departments would be required to submit separate strategic plans for each of their sub-agencies and the administration would have to submit a governmentwide performance report along with agencies' performance reports in March 2000.
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