In three weeks, federal agencies will commence the fiscal 1999 Results Act race, as they pursue the goals laid out in their first-ever annual performance plans. But the paths agencies have laid are fraught with holes, the General Accounting Office warns in a series of new reports.
Agencies' performance plans on the whole do not describe how agency managers will meet fiscal 1999 goals, do not clearly describe those goals, and offer little assurance that agencies will be able to say whether or not they met the goals, GAO said. Those problems will make it difficult for Congress and the White House to evaluate the effectiveness of federal programs.
"We believe that Congress, the Office of Management and Budget and the agencies need to build on the experiences of the first round of annual performance planning by working together and targeting key performance issues that will help to make future plans more useful," GAO said in "Managing for Results: An Agenda to Improve the Usefulness of Agencies' Annual Performance Plans" (GGD/AIMD-98-228).
In February, OMB released a governmentwide performance plan with its fiscal 1999 budget request to Congress, establishing specific goals for federal agencies for the first time. Individual agencies released fiscal 1999 performance plans at the same time. Those plans take effect in October. In March 2000, agencies will inform Congress whether they met their fiscal 1999 goals.
GAO has spent the past year reviewing agencies' performance plans, issuing reports for 24 departments and major agencies. In one of its recent reports, GAO suggests ways to improve agency plans and the governmentwide plan ("The Results Act: Assessment of the Governmentwide Performance Plan for Fiscal Year 1999," AIMD/GGD-98-159).
"Our assessments of agency performance plans indicate that substantial improvements are needed to ensure that these building blocks of the governmentwide plan provide the needed foundation," GAO said.
For example, GAO applauded the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for setting measurable, meaningful performance goals. In fiscal year 1999, CDC says its efforts will reduce the incidence of congenital syphilis in the general population to less than 30 per 100,000 live births, down from 39 per 100,000 in 1995.
The Environmental Protection Agency also earned kudos for describing its activities and resources in terms of what goals they were supposed to achieve. By contrast, the Social Security Administration set goals for the number of Supplemental Security Income claims processed and the number of nondisability redeterminations, but failed to discuss the impact of Social Security on the goal of reducing poverty. Goals need to be focused on outcomes, GAO said.
GAO also criticized many agencies for failing to address the year 2000 problem in their performance plans, even though the governmentwide performance plan lists dealing with the millennium bug as its first priority.
Carl DeMaio, a Results Act consultant with the Washington-based Congressional Institute, said agencies need to involve program managers in Results Act goal-setting and evaluation.
"What we have to start looking at is how we make the Results Act real at the program level. That's where our program managers come into play," DeMaio said. "We need to be able to understand why agencies are funding the programs and activities they are funding."
A third GAO report released this month ("Performance Management: Aligning Employee Performance with Agency Goals at Six Results Act Pilots," GGD-98-162) looks at how some agencies have involved managers. The Small Business Administration, for instance, established capital lending goals for its district offices, and then held the district directors accountable for achieving those goals.
"Year one was a good start," DeMaio said, noting that many people on Capitol Hill and in the agencies are working hard on performance plans. "The big message coming out of the fiscal year 1999 performance plans is they have to be made more useful for decisionmaking."
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