From the U.S. Government Accountability Office, www.gao.gov Transcript for: Addressing Pressing Governance Challenges Description: Audio interview by GAO staff with Chris Mihm, Managing Director, Strategic Issues Related GAO Work: GAO-13-518: Managing for Results: Executive Branch Should More Effectively Use the GPRA Modernization Act to Address Pressing Governance Challenges Released: June 2013 [ Background Music ] [ Narrator: ] Welcome to GAO's Watchdog Report, your source for news and information from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. It's June 2013. The Government Performance and Results Act Modernization Act of 2010 requires individual agencies and the whole government to collect performance information and use it to address fiscal, management, and performance challenges. A team led by Chris Mihm, Managing Director of GAO's Strategic Issues team has been reviewing implementation of the act and its effects thus far. GAO's Sarah Kaczmarek sat down with Chris to talk about what they found. [ Sarah Kaczmarek: ] With the government facing significant fiscal, management, and performance challenges, how’s this Modernization Act gonna help the situation? [ Chris Mihm: ] Hopefully and--it’s designed to help in really two ways. First, it's designed to bring a more crosscutting and integrated perspective of performance across the federal government. What that means specifically is that all the things we look for government to achieve aren't gonna be achieved by one individual agency acting alone, rather it’s networks or patterns of agencies that ought to be working together. What the GPRA Modernization Act is looking to do is to make sure all of these various federal efforts are effectively coordinated. Second, it's looking to make sure that the volume of performance information that's generated by agencies year after year after year actually gets used by leadership and managers to make decisions. We have found looking over many years that tons of information is developed. It doesn't actually get used to make decisions, though. [ Sarah Kaczmarek: ] So what progress has the Executive Branch made, then in this area? [ Chris Mihm: ] I think under the Modernization Act they've made a great deal of progress in a couple of areas. First is that they've put in place the key leadership structure that's needed to effectively implement the Modernization Act. That is, they've designated the chief operating officers, the so-called COO's, performance improvement officers within agencies, established the performance improvement council within the Executive Branch, all this is important stuff. It's put in place, as it were, the infrastructure for good management. There's plenty that needs to be done now to take the actual second and more important step, which is to begin to start using the performance information to, as I mentioned a moment ago, start integrating crosscutting program initiatives, and start using performance information to actually achieve results. [ Sarah Kaczmarek: ] And so, what are some of the major challenges here? [ Chris Mihm: ] We think there's a couple that are really in play; one is that's it's very important to actually have goals that are coordinated across the various programs. If various programs are contributing to a common goal or a common result that we as taxpayers want to achieve, we need to make sure that agencies have goals that are pointed all in the same direction. Second is that we need to start getting the performance information used down deeper within organizations. When we did a survey of federal managers, and it's reported on in this report, we have found that fairly consistently, managers report they have access to information--they don't always use it in order to make decisions. Third, that we have found that there needs to be greater transparency on performance.gov which was the website that was established under requirements of the Act. It's a great thing that has stood up. It’s a great vehicle for citizens to learn about what their government is delivering, but it needs to do a much better job in presenting information to citizens in ways that they can actually use. [ Sarah Kaczmarek: ] Given these challenges, what’s GAO recommending be done in this report? [ Chris Mihm: ] There's a couple of recommendations that we're making; first and foremost is to look at tax expenditures and make sure that they are considered as part of the goals that agencies are trying to achieve. There's about a trillion dollars in forgone revenue each year, which is basically spending that takes place through the tax code. This trillion dollars flies beneath the radar screen in terms of performance. In many cases, tax expenditures are exactly the right program tool, it's the most efficient and effective way in order to achieve a result, our point is it just needs to be subjected to the performance test and thought about as we're looking at other federal spending that's designed to achieve certain goals. So the first issue is dealing with tax expenditures. The second is, we've seen looking now over 20 years and this is actually the 20th anniversary of the original GPRA back in 1993. We've seen over 20 years, longstanding problems that agencies have had in measuring performance for grants programs or direct service programs or regulatory programs or science programs. We really think it's time for the Executive Branch agencies, and this performance improvement council that I mentioned a moment ago, to put in place very specific plans for how they're gonna tackle the performance measurement challenges in each of those various programmatic areas. Plans that have very clear deliverables, who's gonna do what, when, and then publish out the results of those things. It’s just been too long to still having these problems in measuring the fundamental performance of government. [ Sarah Kaczmarek: ] Finally, for taxpayers concerned about these longstanding performance challenges, what's the bottom line here? [ Chris Mihm: ] I think the bottom line is that certainly Congress and the Executive Branch are working real hard to address some of the longstanding management challenges that the government faces, but there's still plenty that needs to be done in order to address those, in order to make sure that citizens and decision makers have the information they need to know how government is performing, what are the performance gaps, and then to identify improvement opportunities and take action on those improvement opportunities. [ Background Music ] [ Narrator: ] To learn more, visit gao.gov and be sure to tune in to the next episode of GAO's Watchdog Report for more from the Congressional Watchdog, the U.S. Government Accountability Office.