Legistorm: Transparency's Sidekick

GAO found that implementation of the Government Performance and Results Act has so far yielded mixed results, which will lead to highly uneven governmentwide implementation in the fall of 1997. Although agencies are likely to meet upcoming statutory deadlines for producing strategic plans and annual performance plans, GAO found that those documents will not be of a consistently high quality or as useful for congressional and agency decisionmaking as they could be. Some agencies, such as the Social Security Administration and the Veterans Health Administration, have already seen significant performance improvements after they adopted a disciplined approach to setting goals, measuring performance, and using performance information to improve effectiveness. In general, however, substantial performance improvements at federal agencies have been relatively few, and many agencies seemed ill prepared to answer the fundamental question posed by the act: What are we accomplishing? Agencies face various challenges to implementing the act, some of which will not be resolved quickly. One set of challenges arises from the complications of government structure and from program proliferation. Others involve methodological difficulties in identifying performance measures or the lack of data needed to establish goals and assess performance.