This is the accessible text file for GAO report number GAO-15-83 
entitled 'Government Efficiency and Effectiveness: Inconsistent 
Definitions and Information Limit the Usefulness of Federal Program 
Inventories' which was released on October 31, 2014. 

This text file was formatted by the U.S. Government Accountability 
Office (GAO) to be accessible to users with visual impairments, as 
part of a longer term project to improve GAO products' accessibility. 
Every attempt has been made to maintain the structural and data 
integrity of the original printed product. Accessibility features, 
such as text descriptions of tables, consecutively numbered footnotes 
placed at the end of the file, and the text of agency comment letters, 
are provided but may not exactly duplicate the presentation or format 
of the printed version. The portable document format (PDF) file is an 
exact electronic replica of the printed version. We welcome your 
feedback. Please E-mail your comments regarding the contents or 
accessibility features of this document to Webmaster@gao.gov. 

This is a work of the U.S. government and is not subject to copyright 
protection in the United States. It may be reproduced and distributed 
in its entirety without further permission from GAO. Because this work 
may contain copyrighted images or other material, permission from the 
copyright holder may be necessary if you wish to reproduce this 
material separately. 

United States Government Accountability Office: 
GAO: 

Report to Congressional Committees: 

October 2014: 

Government Efficiency and Effectiveness: 

Inconsistent Definitions and Information Limit the Usefulness of 
Federal Program Inventories: 

GAO-15-83: 

GAO Highlights: 

Highlights of GAO-15-83, a report to congressional committees. 

Why GAO Did This Study: 

GAO's reports over the past 4 years have found more than 90 areas 
where opportunities exist for the executive branch or Congress to 
better manage, reduce, or eliminate fragmentation, overlap, and 
duplication. GPRAMA calls for the creation of a list (inventory) of 
all federal programs, along with related budget and performance 
information, which could make it easier to determine the scope of the 
federal government's involvement in particular areas and, therefore, 
where action is needed to address crosscutting issues, including 
instances of fragmentation, overlap, or duplication. 

GPRAMA requires GAO to periodically review its implementation. This 
report is part of GAO's response to that mandate and examines (1) how 
OMB and agencies defined programs, (2) the extent to which inventories 
provide useful information for decision makers, and (3) the extent to 
which inventories provide a coherent picture of the scope of federal 
involvement in particular areas. To address these objectives, GAO 
analyzed the 24 inventories using GPRAMA requirements, OMB guidance, 
and related leading practices from GAO's past work, and interviewed 
OMB staff and agency officials. For the first objective, GAO also 
selected two areas of fragmentation, overlap, and duplication 
identified in past GAO work-—STEM education and nuclear 
nonproliferation—-and compared the lists of programs developed in its 
past work to those contained in agency inventories. The two areas were 
selected based on various factors, including the number of agencies 
involved and whether those agencies published an inventory. 

What GAO Found: 

To date, the approach used by the Office of Management and Budget 
(OMB) and agencies has not led to the inventory of all federal 
programs, along with related budget and performance information, 
envisioned in the GPRA Modernization Act of 2010 (GPRAMA). In 
developing the inventory, OMB allowed for significant discretion in 
several areas—leading to a variety of approaches for defining programs 
and inconsistencies in the type of information reported. The 
inconsistent definitions, along with agencies not following an 
expected consultation process, led to challenges in identifying 
similar programs in different agencies. As a result of these 
limitations, the inventory is not a useful tool for decision making. 
OMB is considering options for enhancing the inventory. 

GPRAMA requires OMB to publish a list of all federal programs on a 
central governmentwide website. It also requires OMB to issue 
guidance, and agencies to identify and provide to OMB for publication 
information about each program—-including how they defined their 
programs in line with OMB's guidance. OMB is taking an iterative 
approach to implement these requirements. Based on experiences from a 
pilot involving 11 agencies in 2012, OMB issued guidance allowing 
agencies flexibility to define their programs using different 
approaches, but within a broad definition of what constitutes a 
program—-a set of related activities directed toward a common purpose 
or goal. According to OMB staff, this was based on a lesson learned 
from the pilot effort: a one-size-fits-all approach does not work 
well; agencies and their stakeholders use the term “program” in 
different ways because agencies achieve their missions through 
different programmatic approaches. In May 2013, OMB published the 
inventories developed by 24 agencies, which used various approaches to 
define and identify 1,524 programs (see table below). 

Table: Approaches for Defining Programs and Number of Inventories 
Using Them: 

Approach: Budget; 
Explanation: Links closely with the program activity lines in the 
President's Budget; 
Inventories Using Program Approach: 
In Whole: 13; 
In Part: 5. 

Approach: Customers; 
Explanation: Organized by providing a service or product to a specific 
entity or group; 
Inventories Using Program Approach: 
In Whole: 2; 
In Part: 0. 

Approach: Products, Services, Outputs; 
Explanation: Produces major reports or studies, and may group similar 
products, services or activities into one program; 
Inventories Using Program Approach: 
In Whole: 1; 
In Part: 1. 

Approach: Organizational Structure; 
Explanation: Defined by agency office structure; 
Inventories Using Program Approach: 
In Whole: 0; 
In Part: 4. 

Approach: Outcomes; 
Explanation: Directly attributable to an end result the program is 
trying to achieve; 
Inventories Using Program Approach: 
In Whole: 0; 
In Part: 2. 

Approach: Other; 
Explanation: Agency chose an approach other than those outlined in 
OMB's guidance; 
Inventories Using Program Approach: 
In Whole: 2; 
In Part: 0. 

Source: GAO (analysis) and OMB (guidance and inventories). GAO-15-83. 

[End of table] 

Because agencies used different approaches, similar programs across 
agencies may not be identifiable. To illustrate the shortcomings of 
the inventory, GAO attempted to locate in relevant agencies' 
inventories the various science, technology, engineering, and 
mathematics (STEM) education and nuclear nonproliferation programs 
identified in GAO's past work. GAO was unable to identify in the 
inventories a large majority of the programs previously identified in 
its work: 9 of the 179 programs matched exactly and 51 others were 
identified based on program descriptions. 

The lack of comparability may also be the result of agencies not 
working with each other when developing their inventories. One of OMB'
s stated purposes for the inventories is to facilitate coordination 
among programs that contribute to similar outcomes. However, agencies 
did not work together to consistently define their programs. Increased 
coordination could help agencies identify where they have programs 
that contribute to similar goals and thus, opportunities to 
collaborate in achieving desired outcomes. 

The 24 inventories developed by agencies in 2013 did not provide the 
programs and related budget and performance information required by 
GPRAMA. This limits the usefulness of the inventories to various 
decision makers, including Congress and stakeholders. To be useful, 
the inventories must meet various users' needs for accuracy, 
completeness, consistency, reliability, and validity, among other 
factors. Specific steps OMB and agencies could take to ensure the 
inventories are more useful to decision makers include: 

Presenting program-level budget information. Although GPRAMA requires 
agencies to identify program-level funding, OMB did not direct 
agencies to include this information in their 2013 inventories—it was 
to be part of a planned May 2014 update. However, OMB subsequently put 
the 2014 update on hold to determine how to merge these requirements 
with implementation of the federal spending information to be reported 
under the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014 (DATA 
Act). Reporting for both laws is web-based, which could more easily 
enable linkages between the two sites or incorporating information 
from each other. The Senate version of a bill, the Taxpayers Right-to-
Know Act of 2014, which is currently under consideration, would 
require this linkage in lieu of incorporating budget information on 
the program inventory site. 

Providing complete performance information. GPRAMA and OMB's guidance 
require agencies to describe each program's contribution to the agency'
s goals. However, there are instances where agencies omitted that 
information. For example, agencies did not consistently show how some 
or all of their programs supported strategic goals (in 7 of 24 
inventories) or strategic objectives (in 13 of 24 inventories). 
Ensuring agencies illustrate this alignment would better explain how 
programs support the results agencies are achieving. 

Consulting with stakeholders. None of the agencies sought input on 
their inventories from external stakeholders, such as Congress, state 
and local governments, and third-party service providers, although OMB'
s 2012 guidance instructed agencies to do so. In several instances, 
agency officials stated that they thought OMB was soliciting feedback 
on all inventories. By consulting with stakeholders to understand 
their needs, agencies would better ensure that the information 
provided in the inventories is useful for stakeholder decision making. 

Other features of OMB's approach further limit the program inventories'
ability to present a coherent picture of all federal programs, as 
required by GPRAMA. First, to date, OMB has only included 24 agencies 
in this effort. Second, while not specified by GPRAMA, tax 
expenditures were not included in the 2013 inventory. Tax 
expenditures, which represent a reduction in a taxpayer's tax 
liability through credits, deductions, or other means, resulted in 
$1.1 trillion in forgone revenue in fiscal year 2013, nearly the same 
amount as discretionary spending that year. By including tax 
expenditures, OMB could help ensure that agencies are properly 
identifying their contributions to the achievement of agency goals, as 
OMB's guidance directs them to do. Finally, OMB's guidance and staff 
have stated that eventually the inventory will move to a more dynamic, 
web-based presentation. This could make it easier to tag and sort 
related or similar programs, for instance, by type of program or 
contribution to the same or similar goals. Covering additional 
agencies and tax expenditures in the federal program inventory, along 
with web-based sorting capabilities, would help decision makers 
determine the scope of the federal government's involvement in a 
particular area, and therefore where action is needed to better 
address fragmentation, overlap, or duplication. 

What GAO Recommends: 

GAO makes several recommendations to OMB. To present a more coherent 
picture of all federal programs, GAO recommends OMB revise its 
guidance to direct agencies to collaborate when defining and 
identifying programs that contribute to a common outcome, define plans 
for expanding implementation beyond the current 24 agencies, and 
include tax expenditures in the federal program inventory. In 
addition, to improve the usefulness of the information in inventories 
GAO recommends OMB ensure agencies consistently identify the various 
goals each program supports, and consult with stakeholders when 
developing or updating their inventories. 

OMB staff generally agreed with these recommendations, although they 
neither agreed nor disagreed with three of GAO's recommendations 
related to including tax expenditures and additional performance 
information. OMB staff stated that until they had firmer plans on how 
program inventory and DATA Act implementation would be merged, they 
could not determine if implementing those recommendations would be 
feasible. 

View [hyperlink, http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-15-83]. For more 
information, contact J. Christopher Mihm at (202) 512-6806 or 
mihmj@gao.gov. 

[End of section] 

Contents: 

Letter: 

Background: 

Agencies Used Various Approaches to Define Their Programs, Which 
Limits the Comparability of Programs within and across Agencies: 

Presenting Program Budget Information, Providing Additional and 
Consistent Performance Information, and Seeking Stakeholder Feedback 
Could Help Ensure Inventories Are Useful to Decision Makers: 

Identifying All Federal Programs and Providing Sorting Capabilities 
Could Help Provide a More Coherent Picture of Federal Involvement in 
Particular Areas: 

Conclusions: 

Recommendations for Executive Action: 

Agency Comments: 

Appendix I: Objectives, Scope & Methodology: 

Appendix II: Staff Acknowledgments: 

Tables: 

Table 1: OMB's Approaches for Defining Agency Programs: 

Table 2: Number of Programs and Definition Approaches Identified by 
Agencies: 

Table 3: Analysis of Relevant Agency Inventories for STEM Education 
Programs: 

Table 4: Analysis of Relevant Agency Inventories for Nuclear 
Nonproliferation Programs: 

Table 5: Status of GAO's Recommendations Related to Identifying Goal 
Contributors: 

Table 6: Status of GAO's Recommendations Related to Involving 
Contributors in Reviews: 

Table 7: OMB's Inventory Program Types and Definitions: 

Table 8: Status of GAO's June 2013 Tax Expenditure-related 
Recommendations: 

Figures: 

Figure 1: GAO's Definition of the Term "Program": 

Figure 2: Example of Program Match between GAO's Past Work and 
Department of Education's Inventory: 

Figure 3: Example of Program Identified by Description Based on GAO's 
Past Work and Department of Homeland Security's Inventory: 

Figure 4: Office of Nuclear Energy's Budget Authority Presented in 
Department of Energy's Inventory: 

Abbreviations: 

APG: agency priority goal: 

CAP goal: cross-agency priority goal: 

Corps: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers: 

DATA Act: Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014: 

DHS: Department of Homeland Security: 

DOD: Department of Defense: 

Energy: Department of Energy: 

GPRA: Government Performance and Results Act of 1993: 

GPRAMA: GPRA Modernization Act of 2010: 

Interior: Department of the Interior: 

OMB: Office of Management and Budget: 

OPM: Office of Personnel Management: 

PA: program activity: 

PIC: Performance Improvement Council: 

SBA: Small Business Administration: 

SSA: Social Security Administration: 

State: Department of State: 

STEM: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics: 

Treasury: Department of the Treasury: 

USAID: U.S. Agency for International Development: 

[End of section] 

United States Government Accountability Office: 
GAO:
441 G St. N.W. 
Washington, DC 20548: 

October 31, 2014: 

The Honorable Thomas R. Carper: 
Chairman: 
The Honorable Tom Coburn, M.D. 
Ranking Member: 
Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs: 
United States Senate: 

The Honorable Mark R. Warner: 
Chairman: 
Task Force on Government Performance: 
Committee on the Budget: 
United States Senate: 

The Honorable Elijah E. Cummings: 
Ranking Member: 
Committee on Oversight and Government Reform: 
House of Representatives: 

Many of the meaningful results that the federal government seeks to 
achieve, such as those related to protecting food and agriculture and 
providing homeland security, require the coordinated efforts of more 
than one federal agency, level of government, or sector. However, 
agencies face a range of challenges and barriers when they attempt to 
work across organizational boundaries to address these crosscutting 
issues. Moreover, our reports over the past 4 years have found more 
than 90 areas where opportunities exist for executive branch agencies 
or Congress to reduce fragmentation, overlap, and duplication. 
[Footnote 1] As our annual reports have highlighted, creating a 
comprehensive list of federal programs along with related funding 
information is critical for identifying potential fragmentation, 
overlap, or duplication among federal programs or activities. The lack 
of such a list makes it difficult to determine the scope of the 
federal government's involvement in particular areas and, therefore, 
where action is needed to eliminate, reduce, or better manage 
fragmentation, overlap, or duplication. We also found that budget 
information is often not available or not sufficiently reliable to 
identify the level of funding provided to programs or activities. 

The GPRA Modernization Act of 2010 (GPRAMA)[Footnote 2] requires the 
Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to make publicly available a 
list of all federal programs identified by agencies, along with budget 
and performance information about each federal program.[Footnote 3] In 
May 2013, OMB began implementing this provision by publishing the 
initial program inventories developed by 24 agencies. We are required 
to review implementation of GPRAMA at several critical junctures. 
[Footnote 4] This report is part of our response to that mandate. Our 
specific objectives for this report were to (1) assess how OMB and 
agencies defined and identified the programs contained in the 
inventories, (2) examine the extent to which the inventories provide 
useful information for federal decision makers, and (3) examine the 
extent to which the inventories provide a coherent picture of the 
scope of federal involvement in particular areas. 

To address all three objectives, we assessed the 24 agency program 
inventories published by OMB on Performance.gov in May 2013 using 
relevant GPRAMA requirements, OMB guidance, and related leading 
practices from our past work on managing for results, such as those 
related to involving Congress and stakeholders in performance 
management activities and ensuring performance information is useful 
to decision makers.[Footnote 5] We also developed a structured set of 
questions and conducted interviews with, or received written responses 
from, officials involved in developing the inventories at each of the 
24 agencies. We also interviewed staff from OMB's Office of 
Performance and Personnel Management who led governmentwide 
implementation of these requirements and developed guidance for the 
agencies. 

In addition, to address our first objective, we selected two areas of 
fragmentation, overlap, and duplication from our annual reports—
science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and 
nuclear nonproliferation programs—and compared the lists of programs 
developed by our work to those contained in agency inventories. We 
selected these areas based on the number of agencies involved in the 
area as reported in our past work,[Footnote 6] whether those agencies 
had developed and published an inventory in May 2013, and whether the 
area primarily involved domestic or foreign assistance/national 
security programs—to ensure diversity among the agencies and programs 
we reviewed. Because the two selected areas are a non-generalizable 
sample of instances where fragmentation, overlap, and duplication 
exist, our results cannot be generalized more broadly. However, the 
results of our analysis illustrate how various approaches to defining 
programs can lead to differences in how programs are identified. See 
appendix I for additional information about the objectives, scope, and 
methodology for this report. 

We conducted this performance audit from August 2013 to October 2014 
in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards. 
Those standards require that we plan and perform the audit to obtain 
sufficient, appropriate evidence to provide a reasonable basis for our 
findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives. We believe 
that the evidence obtained provides a reasonable basis for our 
findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives. 

Background: 

GPRAMA requires OMB to make publicly available, on a central 
governmentwide website, a list of all federal programs identified by 
agencies. For each program, the agency is to provide to OMB for 
publication: 

* an identification of how the agency defines the term "program," 
consistent with OMB guidance, including program activities that were 
aggregated, disaggregated, or consolidated to be considered a program 
by the agency; 

* a description of the purposes of the program and how the program 
contributes to the agency's mission and goals; and: 

* an identification of funding for the current fiscal year and the 
previous 2 fiscal years.[Footnote 7] 

In addition, GPRAMA requires OMB to issue guidance to ensure that the 
information provided on the website presents a coherent picture of all 
federal programs.[Footnote 8] 

In January 2012, OMB announced that it would conduct a pilot for 
implementing the inventory provisions for trade, export, and 
competitiveness programs.[Footnote 9] According to OMB's memorandum, 
pilot agencies were to identify an inventory of programs and map them 
to established programmatic and organizational structures as well as 
the agency's strategic plan and performance goals. In addition, 
agencies were to provide program purpose and funding information for 
each program. The memorandum noted that, based on the pilot, OMB would 
issue guidance to all federal agencies detailing the approach for 
developing a governmentwide inventory. 

In its August 2012 update to its guidance for implementing GPRAMA, OMB 
included guidance for broader implementation of the inventory 
requirements.[Footnote 10] Initial implementation was limited to the 
24 agencies that developed agency priority goals (APG) for fiscal 
years 2012-2013.[Footnote 11] In addition, the guidance provided a 
phased approach for these 24 agencies. For the first phase, for 
publication in May 2013, agencies were to describe their program 
definition approach, identify their programs, and provide limited 
funding and performance information. OMB subsequently published 24 
separate inventory documents on the central governmentwide website 
required under GPRAMA, which it has implemented as Performance.gov. 
For the second phase, originally planned for publication in May 2014, 
the 24 agencies were to update their inventories based on any 
stakeholder feedback they received and provide additional program-
level funding and performance information. OMB's guidance also stated 
that at that time the inventory information was to be presented in a 
more dynamic, web-based approach. 

However, agencies did not publish updated inventories in May 2014. 
According to OMB staff, plans for updating the inventories are on 
indefinite hold as OMB re-evaluates next steps for what type of 
information will be presented in the inventories and how it will be 
presented based on (1) recent legislative actions that could affect 
the information required for the inventories; (2) a lack of 
stakeholder feedback; and (3) insufficient funding for,[Footnote 12] 
and technological challenges related to, presenting the inventories in 
a web-based format on Performance.gov. Regarding legislative action, 
OMB staff are considering how implementation of the expanded reporting 
requirements for federal spending information under the recently-
enacted Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014 (DATA Act) 
[Footnote 13] could be tied to the program inventories. The DATA Act 
is intended to increase accountability and transparency in federal 
spending. It requires federal agencies to publicly report, on at least 
a quarterly basis, information about any funding made available to, or 
expended by, an agency or a component of the agency. This reporting 
covers a variety of budget information--budget authority, obligations, 
unobligated balances, outlays, and any other budgetary resources--at 
different levels of aggregation and disaggregation: appropriations 
account, program activities, and object class. Reporting under the act 
is required to begin no later than 3 years after enactment (no later 
than May 9, 2017). In addition, the DATA Act provides for the 
establishment of government-wide financial data standards to, among 
other things, produce consistent and comparable data across program 
activities. The act also holds agencies more accountable for the 
quality of the information disclosed. As we reported in April 2014, 
such increased transparency provides opportunities for improving the 
efficiency and effectiveness of federal spending and improving 
oversight to prevent and detect fraud, waste, and abuse of federal 
funds.[Footnote 14] 

In addition, the House has passed and the Senate is considering a bill 
that would amend the program inventory provisions of GPRAMA. On 
February 25, 2014, the House passed H.R. 1423, the Taxpayers Right-to-
Know Act, which would require agencies to identify, for each program, 
an estimate of the number of clients/beneficiaries served, an estimate 
of (for the previous fiscal year) the number of full-time federal 
employees who administer the program, and the number of full-time 
employees--at organizations that administer or assist in administering 
the program (e.g. grantees or contractors)--whose salary is paid in 
part of full by the federal government. It would also require agencies 
to provide additional program-level information in their inventories, 
including total administrative costs and expenditures for services. On 
May 21, 2014, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and 
Governmental Affairs favorably reported to the full Senate S. 2113, 
the Taxpayers Right-to-Know Act, which would also amend the program 
inventory provisions of GPRAMA to require agencies to identify 
additional program-level information in their inventories. 

Agencies Used Various Approaches to Define Their Programs, Which 
Limits the Comparability of Programs within and across Agencies: 

Agencies Used Different Approaches to Define Their Programs Based on 
OMB's Guidance: 

GPRAMA requires agencies to identify how they define the term 
"program," consistent with guidance provided by the Director of OMB. 
[Footnote 15] As a starting point, OMB's guidance cites, in part, the 
definition for "program" contained in our September 2005 Glossary of 
Terms Used in the Federal Budget Process: an organized set of 
activities directed toward a common purpose or goal that an agency 
undertakes or proposes to carry out its responsibilities.[Footnote 16] 
Figure 1 contains the full definition from our glossary. 

Figure 1: GAO's Definition of the Term "Program": 

[Refer to PDF for image: illustration] 

Program: 
Generally, an organized set of activities directed toward a common 
purpose or goal that an agency undertakes or proposes to carry out its 
responsibilities. Because the term has many uses in practice, it does 
not have a well-defined, standard meaning in the legislative process. 
It is used to describe an agency's mission, functions, activities, 
services, projects, and processes. (See also Program, Project, or 
Activity). 

Source: GAO. GAO-15-83. 

[End of figure] 

The guidance notes that agencies and their stakeholders use the term 
"program" in different ways, and that because agencies have varying 
missions and achieve their missions through different programmatic 
approaches, these differences in the use of the term "program" are 
legitimate and meaningful. As OMB's guidance further states, it does 
not prescribe a superseding definition of "program." Rather, the 
guidance allows agencies to identify programs consistent with the 
manner in which the agencies use programs to interact with key 
stakeholders and execute their missions. 

According to OMB staff, the flexibility provided by the guidance is 
based on lessons learned from the inventory pilot. They told us that, 
for the pilot, OMB developed guidelines for defining programs and 
worked closely with agencies to identify their programs, but in doing 
so realized that a one-size-fits-all approach would not work well 
given differences across agencies in how they operate. Therefore, the 
guidance allowed agencies to define their programs using different 
approaches, but within a broad definition of what constituted a 
program consistent with several characteristics. 

OMB's guidance presents five possible approaches agencies could take 
to define their programs, and notes that agencies could use one or 
more of those approaches in doing so.[Footnote 17] According to OMB 
staff, these approaches were based on the results of the inventory 
pilot. These approaches and OMB's explanation of them are contained in 
Table 1. 

Table 1: OMB's Approaches for Defining Agency Programs: 

Approach: Outcomes; 
Explanation: Directly attributable to an end result the program is 
trying to achieve, such as increased exports. Can also be linked to 
specific functions to accomplish an objective, such as trade 
enforcement. Can cut across organizational units and/or budget 
accounts. 

Approach: Customers; 
Explanation: Organized by the focus on providing a service or product 
to a specific entity or consumer group, such as women-owned small 
businesses or veterans. Can cut across organizational units and/or 
budget accounts. 

Approach: Prominent Products, Services, Outputs; 
Explanation: Produces major reports or studies, such as the Consumer 
Price Index (CPI) and Producer Price Index. May group similar 
products, services or activities into one program. 

Approach: Organizational Structure; 
Explanation: Defined by agency office structure. Offices could focus 
on specific regions, functions or specialized subject matter such as 
U.S. Polar Research or Cyberinfrastructure. 

Approach: Budget; 
Explanation: Links closely with the program activity lines in the 
President's Budget, such as Disaster Recovery or Patents. May align to 
other budget materials such as the Congressional Budget Justification 
or internal agency budget/accounting systems. In some instances, a 
program may be synonymous with its appropriation account title; 
although it is not presumed that an appropriation is the same as a 
program. 

Source: OMB. GAO-14-614. 

[End of table] 

Based on their chosen approach(es), the 24 agencies identified 1,524 
programs. Table 2 shows, by agency, the approach(es) used to define 
programs as well as the number of programs identified. 

Table 2: Number of Programs and Definition Approaches Identified by 
Agencies: 

Department/Agency: Agriculture; 
Programs Identified: 59; 
Program Definition Approach: Budget. 

Department/Agency: Commerce; 
Programs Identified: 70; 
Program Definition Approach: Budget. 

Department/Agency: Defense; 
Programs Identified: 91; 
Program Definition Approach: Budget; Outcomes. 

Department/Agency: Education; 
Programs Identified: 116; 
Program Definition Approach: Budge. 

Department/Agency: Energy; 
Programs Identified: 53; 
Program Definition Approach: Other. 

Department/Agency: Health and Human Services; 
Programs Identified: 115; 
Program Definition Approach: Budget. 

Department/Agency: Homeland Security; 
Programs Identified: 53; 
Program Definition Approach: Structure; Products/Services/Outputs. 

Department/Agency: Housing and Urban Development; 
Programs Identified: 65; 
Program Definition Approach: Budget. 

Department/Agency: the Interior; 
Programs Identified: 166; 
Program Definition Approach: Budget; Organizational Structure. 

Department/Agency: Justice; 
Programs Identified: 119; 
Program Definition Approach: Budget; Organizational Structure. 

Department/Agency: Labor; 
Programs Identified: 45; 
Program Definition Approach: Budget. 

Department/Agency: State (Operations); 
Programs Identified: 22; 
Program Definition Approach: Budget. 

Department/Agency: State & U.S. Agency for International Development 
(Foreign Assistance); 
Programs Identified: 37; 
Program Definition Approach: Budget; Outcomes. 

Department/Agency: Transportation; 
Programs Identified: 60; 
Program Definition Approach: Budget. 

Department/Agency: the Treasury; 
Programs Identified: 94; 
Program Definition Approach: Budget. 

Department/Agency: Veterans Affairs; 
Programs Identified: 93; 
Program Definition Approach: Budget. 

Department/Agency: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers--Civil Works Program; 
Programs Identified: 8; 
Program Definition Approach: Products/Services/Outputs. 

Department/Agency: Environmental Protection Agency; 
Programs Identified: 121; 
Program Definition Approach: Budget. 

Department/Agency: General Services Administration; 
Programs Identified: 22; 
Program Definition Approach: Budget; Organizational Structure. 

Department/Agency: National Aeronautics and Space Administration; 
Programs Identified: 57; 
Program Definition Approach: Budget. 

Department/Agency: National Science Foundation; 
Programs Identified: 13; 
Program Definition Approach: Budget. 

Department/Agency: Office of Personnel Management; 
Programs Identified: 10; 
Program Definition Approach: Customer. 

Department/Agency: Small Business Administration; 
Programs Identified: 32; 
Program Definition Approach: Customer. 

Department/Agency: Social Security Administration; 
Programs Identified: 3; 
Program Definition Approach: Other. 

Department/Agency: Total; 
Programs Identified: 1,524; 
Program Definition Approach: 
Budget: 18; 
Organizational Structure: 4; 
Outcomes: 2; 
Products/Services/Outputs: 2; 
Customer: 2; 
Other: 2. 

Source: GAO (analysis) and OMB (inventories). GAO-15-83. 

Note: The "other" column represents when an agency took an alternate 
approach. The Social Security Administration defined its programs by 
authorizing statute(s). 

[End of table] 

As shown in Table 2, the majority of agencies (19 out of 24) used a 
budget approach, in part or in whole, to define their programs. In 
general, officials at these agencies told us that a primary factor in 
choosing this approach was that their existing financial and 
performance management and reporting systems were organized around 
their budget/appropriations structure. According to these officials, 
this approach will help their agencies meet requirements to include 
budget and performance information by program in future iterations of 
their inventories. 

Inconsistent Definitions Limit Comparability of Programs within 
Agencies and across the Federal Government: 

The use of inconsistent approaches by agencies to define their 
programs, illustrated in Table 2, limits the comparability of programs 
within agencies as well as governmentwide. A few agencies did not use 
the same program definition approach across their subcomponents or 
offices, which limits comparability of their own programs. For 
example, the Department of State's (State) programs are defined using 
two separate approaches. State operations programs follow a budget 
approach while State and U.S. Agency for International Development 
(USAID) foreign assistance programs follow both a budget and outcome-
based approach. In addition, while the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers 
(Corps) is an agency within the Department of Defense (DOD), the 
Corps--Civil Works Program and DOD developed separate inventories that 
took different approaches to define programs. 

To illustrate how program definition differences limit comparability 
across agencies for similar programs, we selected two areas of 
potential fragmentation, overlap, and duplication highlighted in our 
past annual reports: science, technology, engineering and mathematics 
(STEM) education and nuclear nonproliferation and determined which 
programs were recognizable in both. We compared the lists of programs 
developed from our past work to those contained in the relevant 
agencies' inventories.[Footnote 18] 

As shown in Table 3, of the 158 programs previously listed in our work 
on STEM education, we were able to identify 51 programs in relevant 
agency program inventories. 

Table 3: Analysis of Relevant Agency Inventories for STEM Education 
Programs: 

Department/Agency: Agriculture; 
Inventory Approach(es): Budget, Outcomes; 
Number of Programs: 
Identified by GAO Work: 11; 
Identifiable in Inventory: 9; 
Exact Match: 0. 

Department/Agency: Commerce; 
Inventory Approach(es): Budget, Organizational Structure; 
Number of Programs: 
Identified by GAO Work: 13; 
Identifiable in Inventory: 0; 
Exact Match: 0. 

Department/Agency: Defense; 
Inventory Approach(es): Budget, Outcomes; 
Number of Programs: 
Identified by GAO Work: 3; 
Identifiable in Inventory: 0; 
Exact Match: 0. 

Department/Agency: Education; 
Inventory Approach(es): Budget; 
Number of Programs: 
Identified by GAO Work: 8; 
Identifiable in Inventory: 8; 
Exact Match: 7. 

Department/Agency: Energy; 
Inventory Approach(es): Other (GPRA Units); 
Number of Programs: 
Identified by GAO Work: 22; 
Identifiable in Inventory: 1; 
Exact Match: 0. 

Department/Agency: Health and Human Services; 
Inventory Approach(es): Budget, Outcomes; 
Number of Programs: 
Identified by GAO Work: 44; 
Identifiable in Inventory: 1; 
Exact Match: 0. 

Department/Agency: Homeland Security; 
Inventory Approach(es): Organizational Structure, 
Products/Services/Outputs; 
Number of Programs: 
Identified by GAO Work: 4; 
Identifiable in Inventory: 3; 
Exact Match: 0. 

Department/Agency: the Interior; 
Inventory Approach(es): Budget, Organizational Structure; 
Number of Programs: 
Identified by GAO Work: 5; 
Identifiable in Inventory: 0; 
Match: 0. 

Department/Agency: Transportation; 
Inventory Approach(es): Budget; 
Number of Programs: 
Identified by GAO Work: 6; 
Identifiable in Inventory: 0; 
Exact Match: 0. 

Department/Agency: Environmental Protection Agency; 
Inventory Approach(es): Budget; 
Number of Programs: 
Identified by GAO Work: 9; 
Identifiable in Inventory: 1; 
Exact Match: 1. 

Department/Agency: National Aeronautics and Space Administration; 
Inventory Approach(es): Budget; 
Number of Programs: 
Identified by GAO Work: 8; 
Identifiable in Inventory: 5; 
Exact Match: 1. 

Department/Agency: National Science Foundation; 
Inventory Approach(es): Budget; 
Number of Programs: 
Identified by GAO Work: 22; 
Identifiable in Inventory: 22; 
Exact Match: 0. 

Department/Agency: Nuclear Regulatory Commission; 
Inventory Approach(es): Not applicable - OMB did not direct NRC to 
produce an inventory in 2013; 
Number of Programs: 
Identified by GAO Work: 3. 

Department/Agency: Total; 
Number of Programs: 
Identified by GAO Work: 158; 
Identifiable in Inventory: 51; 
Exact Match: 9. 

Source: GAO (analysis) and OMB (inventories). GAO-15-83. 

[End of table] 

Of those 51, 9 were an exact match between how we previously 
identified a program in our past work and how the agency identified it 
in its inventory. For example, as figure 2 illustrates, both our past 
work on STEM education and the Department of Education's program 
inventory identify "Mathematics and Science Partnerships" as a program. 

Figure 2: Example of Program Match between GAO's Past Work and 
Department of Education's Inventory: 

[Refer to PDF for image: illustration] 

Excerpt from GAO's STEM Education Work: 
									
Department of Education Developing Hispanic-Serving Institutions: STEM 
and Articulation Programs: $100,000,000; 
Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need: $30,873,072; 
Mathematics and Science Partnerships: $148,353,872; 
Minority Science and Engineering Improvement Program: $9,466,075; 
Research in Special Education: $3,300,000; 
Research, Development, and Dissemination: $31,200,000; 
Strengthening Predominantly Black Institutions: $15,000,000; 
Upward Bound Math-Science: $44,141,410. 

Excerpt from Department of Education's Program Inventory: 

2. Mathematics and Science Partnerships (CFDA # 84.366) 

Program Description: 

This program is designed to improve the content knowledge of teachers 
and the performance of students in the areas of mathematics and 
science by encouraging states, IHE5, LEAs, and elementary and 
secondary schools to participate in programs that: 

* Improve and upgrade mathematics and science teaching by encouraging 
IHEs and LEAs to work together to improve mathematics and science 
teacher education; 

* Focus on the education of mathematics and science teachers as a 
career-long process; 

* Bring mathematics and science teachers together with scientists, 
mathematicians, and engineers to improve their teaching skills; 

* Improve and expand training of mathematics and science teachers, 
including training such teachers in the effective integration of 
technology into curricula and instruction. 

Source: GAO and Department of Education. GAO-15-83 

[End of figure] 

We were able to identify the other 42 programs based on related 
information contained in program descriptions in relevant agency 
inventories. For four agencies, we were not able to identify any STEM 
education programs from our past work in their inventories--covering 
27 of the 158 programs. In addition, although our past work identified 
3 STEM education programs at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, it was 
not 1 of the 24 agencies directed by OMB to produce a program 
inventory for 2013. 

In the nuclear nonproliferation area, we were able to identify 9 of 
the 21 programs identified in our past work in relevant agency program 
inventories, as shown in table 4. 

Table 4: Analysis of Relevant Agency Inventories for Nuclear 
Nonproliferation Programs: 

Department/Agency: Defense; 
Inventory Approach(es): Budget, Outcomes; 
Number of Programs: 
Identified by GAO Work: 3; 
Identifiable in Inventory: 0; 
Exact Match: 0. 

Department/Agency: Energy; 
Inventory Approach(es): Other (GPRA Units); 
Number of Programs: 
Identified by GAO Work: 6; 
Identifiable in Inventory: 1; 
Exact Match: 0. 

Department/Agency: Homeland Security; 
Inventory Approach(es): Organizational Structure, 
Products/Services/Outputs; 
Number of Programs: 
Identified by GAO Work: 3; 
Identifiable in Inventory: 1; 
Exact Match: 0. 

Department/Agency: Justice; 
Inventory Approach(es): Budget, Organizational Structure; 
Number of Programs: 
Identified by GAO Work: 3; 
Identifiable in Inventory: 1; 
Exact Match: 0. 

Department/Agency: State/U.S. Agency for International Development 
(Foreign Assistance); 
Inventory Approach(es): Budget, Outcomes; 
Number of Programs: 
Identified by GAO Work: 6; 
Identifiable in Inventory: 6; 
Exact Match: 0. 

Department/Agency: TOTAL; 
Number of Programs: 
Identified by GAO Work: 21; 
Identifiable in Inventory: 9; 
Exact Match: 0. 

Source: GAO (analysis) and OMB (inventories). GAO-15-83. 

[End of table] 

None of the nine nuclear nonproliferation programs we were able to 
identify in the inventories were exact matches. Rather, we were able 
to identify them as activities under larger programs in the 
inventories based on the related program descriptions. For example, 
our past work identified the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) 
"Global Nuclear Detection Architecture" as a program within its 
Domestic Nuclear Detection Office. DHS's inventory identifies one 
program, Domestic Radiological/Nuclear Detection, Forensics, and 
Prevention Capability, within the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office. 
The inventory describes Global Nuclear Detection Architecture as an 
activity within that program, as illustrated in figure 3. 

Figure 3: Example of Program Identified by Description Based on GAO's 
Past Work and Department of Homeland Security's Inventory: 

[Refer to PDF for image: illustration] 

Excerpt from GAO's Nuclear Nonproliferation Work: 

Department of Homeland Security: 
Program: 
Global Nuclear Detection Architecture (GNDA) and related programs and 
activities. 

Excerpt from Department of Homeland Security's Program Inventory: 

Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO): 

Domestic Rad/Nuc Detection, Forensics and Prevention Capability: 

The Domestic Rad/Nuc Detection, Forensics and Prevention Capability 
program leads the U.S. Governmenet (USG) with development of the 
Global Nuclear Detection Architecture and its domestic implementation, 
as well as coordination and stewardship of USG technical nuclear 
forensics efforts. Functions include integrating interagenciy efforts 
to develop detection techniloogies, evaluating detector performance, 
eusring effiective response to detection alarms, integrating and 
ensuring readiness of U.S. nuclear forensics capabilities, and 
conducting transformational research and development for radiological 
and nuclear (rad/nuc) detection and forensics technologies. 

Source: GAO and Department of Homeland Security. GAO-15-83. 

[End of figure] 

For both illustrative examples, we were not able to locate a majority 
of the programs identified in our prior work in the relevant agency 
inventories. The lack of comparability of similar programs across 
agencies in part could be due to differences in the way we previously 
defined "program" and the way each agency defined its programs, such 
as different levels of aggregation of related activities to constitute 
a program. The flexibility OMB's guidance afforded in defining 
programs allows agencies to align their definitions with multiple 
purposes, including carrying out their mission and goals; serving 
beneficiaries, customers, and other target populations; and providing 
benefits, services, and products. However, it also can lead to 
differences in how programs are identified. 

In addition, the lack of comparability may also be the result of 
agencies not working across organizational boundaries when developing 
their inventories. We asked agency officials whether they had worked 
with any external parties when determining their program definition 
approach or identifying their programs. Officials from all 24 agencies 
stated that they had not sought input from any entities outside their 
own agencies, with the exception of OMB. One of OMB's stated purposes 
for the inventories is to facilitate coordination among programs that 
contribute to similar outcomes. If agencies worked together to more 
consistently define their programs, it could also help them identify 
where they have programs that contribute to similar outcomes, and 
therefore opportunities to collaborate. 

In a Few Instances, Several Agencies Did Not Include Activities in 
Their Inventories Based on OMB's Criteria for Determining What 
Constitutes a Program: 

OMB's guidance directed agencies to work with OMB to determine the 
appropriate primary approach (or mix of approaches) and level of 
aggregation/disaggregation to be used to define their programs. It 
also identified characteristics agencies should consider when 
determining what constitutes a program (see text box).[Footnote 19] 
Officials at each of the 24 agencies told us that they worked with 
OMB--with most stating it was staff in relevant Resource Management 
Offices as well as the Office of Performance and Personnel Management--
to determine (1) the appropriate approach and (2) what constitutes a 
program. Similarly, staff within OMB's Office of Performance and 
Personnel Management told us that they worked closely with agencies as 
they were defining and identifying their programs. 

Text box: 

OMB's Characteristics of a Program: 

* Externally recognizable. Agencies should use programs that are or 
relate to programs or objectives used in Congressional Budget 
Justifications, statute, are recognized by Congress and stakeholders, 
or are already publicly known; agencies should use program names that 
are known outside the agency, and generally not create new names; 

* Operationally meaningful. Agencies should use programs that are 
operationally meaningful to agency senior leadership and components of 
the agency, and programs should represent how the agency is managed 
and delivers on its mission; 

* Link to an organizational component(s), such as headquarters, bureau 
or office. Programs should be operationally meaningful to the agency 
and agency senior leadership; 

* Persistent. Generally, programs that persist over time should be 
included. However, agencies have the flexibility to identify short-
term efforts as programs, such as activities related to the Recovery 
Act. 

Source: OMB. GAO-15-83. 

Note: While the other three characteristics were included in OMB's 
guidance beginning in 2012, "operationally meaningful" was added in 
the July 2013 update. 

[End of text box] 

When we asked officials at each agency if the inventory covered 
everything the agency does, most responded that the inventory included 
all agency activities. However, officials at a few agencies told us 
that their inventories did not always include certain activities. In 
most cases, activities were excluded from the inventory because they 
did not meet one of the characteristics of a program described in 
OMB's guidance. For instance, the Small Business Administration (SBA) 
only included programs that were permanent in nature and excluded 
pilot programs from its inventory because, according to SBA officials, 
they did not consider pilot programs to meet the "persistent" 
characteristic. As an example, they cited SBA's Boots to Business 
program, which was in a pilot phase when the agency's 2013 inventory 
was published. SBA officials told us they expected to add the program 
in the next inventory update as the pilot phase had been completed. 
Because OMB's guidance does not clearly define when a short-term 
activity has persisted long enough to be considered a program, 
agencies may be using different criteria for when to include them as 
programs in their inventories. As a result, agencies' inventories may 
not be as comprehensive as desired. Clearer guidance from OMB could 
lead to a more complete picture of federal programs in the inventory. 

In other instances, Office of Personnel Management (OPM) officials 
told us they did not include a voting rights oversight program in 
their inventory because it was not operationally meaningful, in that 
it did not easily align with OPM's mission. Social Security 
Administration (SSA) officials told us they, in consultation with OMB 
staff, did not include the Special Benefits for Certain World War II 
Veterans program in their inventory because it is relatively small in 
size, in terms of its funding ($8 million of the agency's total net 
budget authority of $55.9 billion in fiscal year 2013) and number of 
beneficiaries (approximately 1,000, based on information in SSA's 
fiscal year 2015 congressional budget justification) compared to the 
agency's other programs. In response to a question during our 
interview, Department of the Interior (Interior) officials realized 
they did not include functional management offices, such as the 
Offices of Policy and the Chief Financial Officer, as part of a set of 
"programs" in their inventory falling under the Office of the 
Secretary. Agency officials at OPM, SSA and Interior told us they 
intend to account for these programs in future iterations of their 
program inventories. 

Presenting Program Budget Information, Providing Additional and 
Consistent Performance Information, and Seeking Stakeholder Feedback 
Could Help Ensure Inventories Are Useful to Decision Makers: 

The federal government is one of the world's largest and most diverse 
entities, with about $3.5 trillion in outlays in fiscal year 2013, 
funding an extensive array of programs and operations. In responding 
to the varied and increasingly complex issues the federal government 
seeks to address, it faces a number of significant fiscal, management, 
and governance challenges. To operate as effectively and efficiently 
as possible and to make difficult decisions to address these 
challenges, Congress, the administration, and federal managers must 
have ready access to reliable and complete financial and performance 
information. However, crucial information on the federal government's 
programs is decentralized, according to OMB's guidance. The federal 
program inventory has the potential to improve public understanding 
about what federal programs currently operate and how programs link to 
budget, performance, and other information by centralizing this 
information from disparate sources--such as the President's Budget, 
Congressional Budget Justifications, USAspending.gov, and the Catalog 
of Federal Domestic Assistance--in a single location: Performance.gov. 
Agencies should consider the differing needs of various users--agency 
top leadership and line managers, OMB, Congress, and stakeholders--to 
ensure that this information will be both useful and used in decision 
making.[Footnote 20] To be useful, this information must meet users' 
needs for accuracy, completeness, consistency, reliability, and 
validity, among other factors. 

Agencies Generally Did Not Present Program-level Budget Information in 
Their Inventories but DATA Act Implementation Could Provide More 
Detailed and Consistent Data: 

GPRAMA requires agencies to identify for each program in their 
inventories: 

* the program activities that are aggregated, disaggregated, or 
consolidated to be considered a program by the agency;[Footnote 21] 
and: 

* funding for the current and two previous fiscal years (for the 
inventories published in May 2013, that would have been fiscal years 
2013, 2012, and 2011).[Footnote 22] 

OMB's 2012 and 2013 guidance delayed implementation of these 
provisions until the planned May 2014 update. 

Although OMB's guidance delayed this, some agencies provided this 
information in their inventories. A few agencies provided information 
about how their program activity (PA) lines align with their programs 
as defined in their inventory. For example, the National Science 
Foundation's inventory notes that programs presented in it are 
consistent with the PA lines presented in the budget. In addition, the 
Department of Transportation's inventory states that its programs 
generally consist of one to four PA lines. For example, the Pipeline 
and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration's "Pipeline Safety" 
program receives its funding from four PA lines. 

In addition, OMB's guidance directed agencies to include funding 
(budget authority) for agency bureaus or subcomponents for fiscal 
years 2012, 2013, and 2014 (requested). Since some agencies identified 
a bureau/subcomponent to constitute a program, the bureau-level 
funding information in their 2013 inventories also met GPRAMA's 
requirement for program-level funding information. For example, the 
Department of Energy (Energy) defined its Office of Nuclear Energy as 
a program. Because the office is also considered a subcomponent, 
Energy provided the related funding information, as illustrated in 
figure 4. 

Figure 4: Office of Nuclear Energy's Budget Authority Presented in 
Department of Energy's Inventory: 

[Refer to PDF for image: illustration] 

Nuclear Energy (NE): 

Total Budget Authority[A]: 

FY 2012 actual: $760.5 million; 
FY 2013 CR7: $35.5 million; 
FY 2014 estimated: $770.1 million. 	 

[A] These funding levels are not fully comparable year-to-year due to 
budget structure changes. 

Source: Department of Energy. GAO-15-83. 

[End of figure] 

As noted earlier, plans for updating the inventories are on indefinite 
hold and agencies did not publish updated inventories, with the 
planned program-level budget data, in May 2014--in part due to the 
enactment of the DATA Act. According to OMB's 2014 update to its 
guidance, it is working with agencies to merge implementation of the 
DATA Act and federal program inventory requirements to the extent 
possible, but has not yet determined its implementation strategy. 
Agency reporting for both sets of requirements is web-based, which 
could more easily enable linkages between the two sites or 
incorporating information from each other. The Senate version of the 
Taxpayers Right-to-Know Act would require this linkage in lieu of 
incorporating this budget information on the program inventory site. 
As OMB stated, one of its purposes in implementing the program 
inventory requirements is to consolidate information from various 
sources. By leveraging the DATA Act's requirements, OMB could expand 
the transparency of budget information made available in the 
inventories--beyond PA lines and budget authority and at different 
levels of disaggregation--and help ensure that information is 
consistent across agencies. In addition, the disaggregated budget 
information is important since our annual reports on fragmentation, 
overlap, and duplication have found that it is not always available 
for the programs and activities covered by our work. However, the DATA 
Act provides up to 3 years for full implementation of its reporting 
requirements. Thus, until OMB and agencies are ready to move forward 
with the implementation of the two laws' requirements, one option to 
help ensure the inventories remain relevant and useful would be for 
OMB to direct agencies to update the existing information in the 2013 
versions for publication. 

Agencies Defined the Purposes of Their Programs but Did Not 
Consistently Show How Programs Contribute to Agency Missions, Goals, 
and Results: 

GPRAMA requires agencies to describe for each program in their 
inventories: 

* the purposes of the program and: 

* the program's contribution to the agency's mission and goals. 
[Footnote 23] 

OMB's guidance for the 2013 inventories directed agencies to provide a 
program description (purpose) and identify supported strategic goals 
and objectives. In addition, they were to add language directing 
readers to Performance.gov to see programs supporting their agency 
priority goals (APG) and the cross-agency priority (CAP) goals. 

Agencies provided descriptions of their programs' purposes. However, 
some agencies did not consistently show how each program supports 
agency missions and goals. 

* With the exception of one inventory--the joint State/USAID inventory 
for foreign assistance programs--all provided a purpose for each 
program, although State and USAID provided a link to a separate 
document that provided purpose information for their foreign 
assistance programs. 

* Only a few inventories (4 of 24) identified how the agencies' 
programs contribute to their mission. However, because agency 
strategic goals and objectives are an outgrowth of the agency's 
mission, the linkage between agency programs and those goals can show 
the program's support to the mission. 

* A majority of the inventories (17 of 24) identified the agency 
strategic goals each program supported,[Footnote 24] while less than 
half of the inventories (11 of 24) identified the agency strategic 
objectives each program supported.[Footnote 25] 

* Finally, most of the inventories (20 out of 24) referred readers to 
Performance.gov for information about how the agencies' programs 
support both CAP goals and APGs. 

OMB's review of the inventories did not always identify instances 
where agencies omitted this information. Providing this information 
allows agencies to explain how programs contribute to the results the 
federal government is achieving. Consistently showing the alignment 
between programs and goals could also improve implementation of other 
GPRAMA provisions. First, GPRAMA requires OMB and agencies to identify 
for publication on Performance.gov the various organizations, program 
activities, and other activities that contribute to the CAP goals and 
APGs, respectively.[Footnote 26] In addition, OMB's guidance directs 
agencies to identify these contributors for their strategic 
objectives. These provisions are important because they show how 
agencies are coordinating efforts toward a common outcome. As we have 
previously reported, uncoordinated program efforts can waste scarce 
funds, confuse and frustrate program customers, and limit the overall 
effectiveness of the federal effort.[Footnote 27] Our past work has 
found that OMB and agencies did not always identify all relevant 
contributors to their CAP goals and APGs.[Footnote 28] Accordingly, in 
May 2012 and April 2013, we made recommendations to OMB. Table 5 
describes these recommendations and related actions taken to date. 

Table 5: Status of GAO's Recommendations Related to Identifying Goal 
Contributors: 

Report: Managing for Results: Agencies Should More Fully Develop 
Priority Goals under the GPRA Modernization Act, GAO-13-174 
(Washington, D.C.: Apr. 19, 2013); 
Recommendation: In April 2013, we recommended that the Director of OMB 
should ensure agencies adhere to OMB's guidance for website updates by 
providing complete information about the organizations, program 
activities, regulations, policies, tax expenditures, and other 
activities--both within and external to the agency--that contribute to 
each APG; 
Status: OMB staff agreed with this recommendation. As of July 2014, 
OMB had not taken any actions to address it. Information about 
organizations, program activities, regulations, policies, tax 
expenditures, and other activities contributing to APGs are 
temporarily unavailable on Performance.gov According to information 
provided by OMB staff in July 2014, agencies were to select these 
contributors based on the web-based update of the program inventories 
that were to be published in May 2014. Because plans to update the 
inventories are on indefinite hold, it is not clear when this 
information will be made available on Performance.gov. We will 
continue to monitor progress. 

Report: Managing for Results: GAO's Work Related to the Interim 
Crosscutting Priority Goals under the GPRA Modernization Act, GAO-12-
620R (Washington, D.C.: May 31, 2012); 
Recommendation: In May 2012, we recommended that the Director of OMB, 
in considering additional programs with the potential to contribute to 
the crosscutting goals, should review the additional departments, 
agencies, and programs that we have identified, and consider including 
them in the federal government's performance plan, as appropriate; 
Status: OMB staff agreed with this recommendation. In December 2012, 
and again in May 2013, OMB updated information on Performance.gov on 
the cross-agency priority goals. In these updates, OMB added some of 
the departments, agencies, and programs that we recommended in our 
report. For example, we had noted that 12 member agencies of the Trade 
Promotion Coordination Committee had not been identified as 
contributors to the Export Cross Agency Priority Goal, which aims to 
double U.S. exports by the end of 2014. This information was added to 
Performance.gov in its December 2012 update. As a result of these 
actions, we closed this recommendation. 

Source: GAO and OMB. GAO-15-83. 

[End of table] 

Second, GPRAMA requires OMB and agencies, on at least a quarterly 
basis, to review and report on Performance.gov progress towards the 
CAP goals and APGs, respectively.[Footnote 29] As part of these 
reviews, OMB and agencies are to (1) involve relevant stakeholders 
from contributing organizations and program activities and (2) assess 
the contributions of the various organizations, program activities, 
and other activities that support these goals.[Footnote 30] In 
addition, OMB's 2013 guidance for implementing GPRAMA directed 
agencies, beginning this year (2014), to conduct annual reviews of 
progress towards their strategic objectives--the outcomes or impacts 
the agency is intending to achieve. According to OMB's guidance, the 
strategic reviews should inform many of the agency's decision-making 
processes, as well as decision making by the agency's stakeholders, 
such as informing long-term strategy, annual planning and budget 
formulation; strengthening collaboration on crosscutting issues; and 
improving transparency. If successfully implemented in a way that is 
open, inclusive, and transparent--to Congress, delivery partners 
(e.g., state and local governments, grantees, non-profit 
organizations, associations, contractors), and a full range of 
stakeholders--these reviews could help decision makers assess the 
relative contributions of various programs that contribute to a given 
goal.[Footnote 31] Successful reviews could also help decision makers 
identify and assess the interplay of public policy tools that are 
being used, to ensure that those tools are effective and mutually 
reinforcing, and results are being efficiently achieved. However, our 
past work has found that relevant contributors were not always 
included in these reviews and accordingly we made recommendations to 
OMB, as described in table 6.[Footnote 32] 

Table 6: Status of GAO's Recommendations Related to Involving 
Contributors in Reviews: 

Report: Managing for Results: Data-Driven Performance Reviews Show 
Promise But Agencies Should Explore How to Involve Other Relevant 
Agencies, GAO-13-228 (Washington, D.C.: Feb. 27, 2013); 
Recommendation: In February 2013, we recommended that the Director of 
the OMB should work with the Performance Improvement Council (PIC) and 
other relevant groups to identify and share promising practices to help 
agencies extend their quarterly performance reviews to include, as 
relevant, representatives from outside organizations that contribute to 
achieving their agency performance goals; 
Status: OMB staff agreed with this recommendation. As of July 2014, 
OMB and the PIC have taken some steps towards addressing this 
recommendation.OMB. According to staff from OMB and the PIC meetings 
of the PIC Internal Reviews working group have been used to discuss 
the inclusion of representatives from external organizations in agency 
quarterly performance reviews. The PIC continues to work with agencies 
to identify examples where agencies have included representatives from 
outside organizations in quarterly reviews, and to identify promising 
practices based on those experiences. Once examples and promising 
practices have been identified they plan to disseminate these through 
the PIC Internal Reviews working group, PIC meeting panels, summits, 
and other venues. We will continue to monitor progress. 

Report: Managing for Results: Enhanced Goal Leader Accountability and 
Collaboration Could Further Improve Agency Performance, GAO-14-639 
(Washington, D.C.: Jul. 22, 2014); 
Recommendation: In June 2014, we recommended that the Director of OMB 
should direct CAP goal leaders to identify all key contributors to the 
achievement of their goals; 
Status: In comments on a draft of the report, OMB staff agreed with 
this recommendation. 

Source: GAO, OMB, and PIC. GAO-15-83. 

[End of table] 

OMB's guidance does not direct agencies to identify in their 
inventories the performance goals to which each program contributes. 
Although not specifically required for the program inventory, GPRAMA 
requires agencies, in their annual performance plans, to identify the 
various organizations, program activities, and other activities that 
contribute to each performance goal.[Footnote 33] As noted in the 
Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs report 
that accompanied GPRAMA, this provision, among others, was intended to 
help describe the strategies to be used to achieve results and the 
resources to be applied to those strategies.[Footnote 34] This 
information can help Congress understand and assess the relationship 
between the agency's resources and results. Having a clear description 
of the strategies and resources an agency plans to use will allow 
Congress to assess the likelihood for an agency to achieve its 
intended results. The act also requires that agency performance goals 
and related information be available in a web-based format on 
Performance.gov.[Footnote 35] According to OMB staff, efforts to 
expand the site to include this information have not been possible 
given the available appropriations for the E-Government Fund, which 
supports Performance.gov and other electronic government requirements 
and initiatives. 

Agencies Did Not Take Steps to Ensure Inventories Provide Useful 
Information for Stakeholders, including Congress: 

OMB's 2012 guidance directed agencies to work with key stakeholders, 
which can include Congress, state and local governments, third party 
service providers, and the public, to validate that their program 
inventories would be both internally and externally recognizable. 
According to OMB staff, they want to ensure that the inventories are 
useful and meaningful to the agencies and their stakeholders. 

Although officials we spoke with or received written responses from at 
each of the 24 agencies told us that they involved internal 
stakeholders--officials and staff from various bureaus/component 
agencies and offices within their respective department or agency--to 
validate their programs, most also shared that they saw no benefit to 
their agencies from developing the inventories. Many told us that they 
viewed it as a paperwork exercise, repackaging information available 
elsewhere with the resulting inventory not useful to their internal 
agency decision making. In a few instances, officials offered 
different views. For example, an official at DHS told us that her 
department's approach to linking programs to performance information 
helped the department communicate the results it was achieving. She 
noted that DHS has maintained an external-facing, mission-oriented 
program structure since it was created. In addition, an official from 
SBA told us he thought the program inventories--once fully implemented 
as envisioned in OMB's guidance for the 2014 update--could help his 
agency identify instances to enhance their coordination and 
collaboration with other agencies to achieve common outcomes. 

Officials we spoke with or who provided written responses to our 
questions also told us that they did not solicit feedback on their 
inventories from external stakeholders, including Congress. In 
addition, none of them reported receiving any feedback on their 
inventories beyond that from OMB staff during development. In some 
instances, agency officials told us that they didn't seek stakeholder 
input because their approach for defining their programs resulted in 
programs with which their stakeholders were already familiar. For 
example, officials at several agencies told us that using a budget 
approach resulted in programs that were recognizable to congressional 
appropriators. In other instances, agency officials told us they 
thought OMB staff were collecting feedback on the inventories, but 
they had not heard any results at the time of our interview. When we 
asked OMB staff about any feedback they had solicited or received, 
they told us they had briefed two congressional committees when the 
inventories were published in May 2013, but that they had not received 
any formal feedback from Congress or any other stakeholders, with the 
exception of the preliminary results of our review, which we published 
as part of a testimony before the Senate Committee on Homeland 
Security and Governmental Affairs in March 2014.[Footnote 36] In 
addition, although Performance.gov has a mechanism for users to 
provide feedback on the website, OMB staff stated that they had not 
received any feedback on the program inventories from that venue. 

Our work over the years has shown the importance of involving 
stakeholders, especially Congress, in federal management and 
performance initiatives.[Footnote 37] In the case of the inventories, 
agency consultation with Congress is of particular importance given 
Congress's power to create and fund programs. Moreover, the 
inventories, if properly implemented, could provide Congress an 
important oversight tool, with key program budget and performance 
information consolidated in a single location. However, OMB's 2013 and 
2014 updates to its guidance excluded directions to agencies to seek 
stakeholder feedback. Obtaining stakeholder input, and congressional 
input in particular, on program inventories and the information 
presented therein would provide OMB and agencies another opportunity 
to ensure they are presenting useful information for stakeholder 
decision making. 

Identifying All Federal Programs and Providing Sorting Capabilities 
Could Help Provide a More Coherent Picture of Federal Involvement in 
Particular Areas: 

GPRAMA requires OMB to ensure that the inventory information provided 
by agencies and published on Performance.gov presents a coherent 
picture of all federal programs.[Footnote 38] As our annual reports on 
fragmentation, overlap, and duplication have stated, the federal 
program inventory could be a key tool for addressing crosscutting 
issues. For example, as highlighted in OMB's guidance, the federal 
program inventory has the potential to facilitate coordination across 
programs by making it easier to find programs that may contribute to a 
shared goal. Moreover, in its memorandum regarding the inventory pilot 
project for trade, export, and competitiveness programs, OMB noted 
that duplicative programs make government less effective, waste 
taxpayer dollars, and make it harder for the public to navigate 
government services. It states that, in order to continue efforts to 
reduce duplication and overlap and improve program outcomes through 
better coordination across agencies, the executive branch must achieve 
greater transparency into all federal programs. 

OMB Has Not Defined Plans to Expand Inventories to Include All Federal 
Programs: 

GPRAMA requires OMB to make publicly available a list of all federal 
programs identified by agencies. While the 24 agencies have begun 
implementing the inventory requirements, OMB has not defined plans for 
when this effort will be expanded beyond these agencies. As noted 
earlier in the report, the lack of such a comprehensive list makes it 
difficult to determine the scope of the federal government's 
involvement in particular areas and, therefore, where action is needed 
to address crosscutting issues. 

In addition, OMB has not included all types of federal programs in its 
plans for the program inventory. OMB's guidance identified 12 
different types of federal programs, defined in table 7, for agencies 
to assign to their programs.[Footnote 39] Agencies are to select one 
or more program type for each program in their inventories. 

Table 7: OMB's Inventory Program Types and Definitions: 

Program Type: Direct Federal Programs; Definition: Programs where 
services are provided primarily by employees of the Federal Government, 
such as the State Department's Consular Services program. 

Program Type: Direct Federal Benefits Programs; 
Definition: Programs where the Federal Government provides benefits or 
other payments to individuals, such as the Veteran's Administration 
disability payment program. 

Program Type: State-Administered Benefit Programs; 
Definition: Programs where the Federal Government provides funding to 
States for benefits, reimbursements, or other payments to recipients. 
Program examples include the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program 
for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) and Temporary Assistance for 
Needy Families (TANF). 

Program Type: Competitive Grant Programs; 
Definition: Programs that provide funds to State, local and tribal 
governments, organizations, individuals and other entities through a 
competitive process, such as Health Centers at the Department of 
Health and Human Services (HHS). 

Program Type: Block/Formula Grant Programs; 
Definition: Programs that provide funds to State, local and tribal 
governments and other entities by formula or block grant, such as the 
Department of Energy's (DOE) Weatherization Assistance program and 
HHS' Foster Care program. 

Program Type: Regulatory-Based Programs; 
Definition: Programs that accomplish their mission through rulemaking 
that implements, interprets or prescribes law or policy, or describes 
procedure or practice requirements, such as Small Business 
Administration's Size Standards program. 

Program Type: Capital Assets and Public Works Programs; 
Definition: Programs that achieve their goals through development, 
acquisition, and operation of capital assets (e.g. land, structures, 
equipment) or the purchase of services (e.g. maintenance, and 
information technology). Program examples include Navy Shipbuilding 
and the Bonneville Power Administration. 

Program Type: Information Assets Programs; 
Definition: Programs that achieve their goals through the development, 
acquisition, analysis, and/or dissemination of information. Program 
examples include the Census. 

Program Type: Service Acquisition Programs; 
Definition: Programs that achieve their goals through the purchase of 
services (e.g. maintenance, and information technology). 

Program Type: Credit Programs; 
Definition: Programs that provide support through loans, loan 
guarantees and direct credit, such as the Export Import Bank's Long 
Term Guarantees program. 

Program Type: Insurance Programs; 
Definition: Programs where the Federal Government provides 
compensation against the risk of specified loss, damage, illness, or 
death in return for payment of premiums. 

Program Type: Research and Development (R&D) Programs; 
Definition: Programs that focus on knowledge creation or its 
application to the creation of systems, methods, materials, or 
technologies, such as DOE's Solar Energy and NASA's Solar System 
Exploration programs. 

Source: OMB. GAO-15-83. 

[End of table] 

However, OMB has not included tax expenditures as part of the 
inventory effort.[Footnote 40] GPRAMA does not specify that tax 
expenditures should be included in the program inventory, but they 
represent a substantial federal investment. If the Department of the 
Treasury (Treasury) estimates are summed, an estimated $1.1 trillion 
in revenue was forgone from the 169 tax expenditures reported for 
fiscal year 2013, nearly the same as discretionary spending that year. 
Since 1994, we have recommended greater scrutiny of tax expenditures, 
as periodic reviews could help determine how well specific tax 
expenditures work to achieve their goals and how their benefits and 
costs compare to those of spending programs with similar goals. In 
addition, in our June 2013 report on initial GPRAMA implementation, we 
made several recommendations to OMB, described in table 8, to 
recognize the contributions of tax expenditures to the achievement of 
broad outcomes.[Footnote 41] 

Table 8: Status of GAO's June 2013 Tax Expenditure-related 
Recommendations: 

Report: Managing for Results: Executive Branch Should More Fully 
Implement the GPRA Modernization Act to Address Pressing Governance 
Challenges, GAO-13-518 (Washington, D.C.: Jun. 26, 2013); 

Recommendation: In June 2013, we recommended that the Director of OMB 
take the following three actions to help ensure that the contributions 
made by tax expenditures toward the achievement of agency goals and 
broader federal outcomes are properly recognized; 
Status: [Empty]. 

Recommendation 1: Revise relevant OMB guidance to direct agencies 
to identify relevant tax expenditures among the list of federal 
contributors for each appropriate agency goal; 
Status: OMB staff agreed with the recommendation and took actions to 
implement it. In its July 2013 update to guidance for implementing the 
GPRAMA, OMB directs agencies, as appropriate, to identify tax 
expenditures among the list of federal contributors to each agency 
strategic objective. Strategic objectives reflect the outcomes or 
impacts the agency is intending to achieve and are to be tracked 
through a suite of performance goals and other indicators. According 
to the guidance, the agency's set of strategic objectives should be 
comprehensive of all agency activity. As a result, we closed this 
recommendation. 

Recommendation 2: Review whether all relevant tax expenditures that 
contribute to a CAP goal have been identified, and as necessary, 
include any additional tax expenditures in the list of federal 
contributors for each goal; 
Status: OMB staff agreed with these 2 recommendations. As of July 
2014, OMB has not taken any actions to address them, according to 
information provided by OMB and Performance Improvement Council (PIC) 
staff. 

Recommendation 3: Assess the contributions relevant tax expenditures 
are making toward the achievement of each CAP goal; 
Status: OMB and PIC staff told us that as they work with the CAP goal 
leaders to develop and refine implementation plans and quarterly 
updates for the new CAP goals published in March 2014, they intend to 
identify tax expenditures as contributors to those goals over time. 
Once those tax expenditures are identified, OMB and PIC staff told us 
they plan to work with CAP goal leaders to determine the best approach 
to assess the contributions relevant tax expenditures are making 
towards goal achievement. We will continue to monitor progress. 

Source: GAO and OMB. GAO-15-83. 

[End of table] 

GPRAMA requires OMB to identify tax expenditures that contribute to 
the CAP goals.[Footnote 42] In addition, OMB guidance directs agencies 
to identify tax expenditures that contribute to their strategic 
objectives and APGs. Our work reviewing GPRAMA implementation has 
found that OMB and agencies have not adequately identified the 
contributions of tax expenditures to the CAP goals and APGs.[Footnote 
43] OMB's July 2013 guidance noted that it would work with Treasury 
and agencies to identify where tax expenditures align with their 
goals, and this information was to be included in updated agency 
strategic plans, performance plans, and on Performance.gov, published 
concurrently with the President's Budget for Fiscal Year 2015 (March 
2014). However, according to OMB staff, they did not begin to engage 
Treasury on this effort until after the plans were published and the 
website was updated. 

OMB staff also told us that they continue to explore options for 
including tax expenditures in the inventory effort, but they had no 
specific plans as of May 2014. The federal program inventory is the 
primary tool for agencies to identify programs that contribute to 
their goals, according to OMB's guidance. By including tax 
expenditures in the inventory, OMB could help ensure that agencies are 
properly identifying the contributions of tax expenditures to the 
achievement of their goals. In addition, doing so would also further 
OMB's stated purposes of centralizing information from disparate 
sources, since a list of tax expenditures, along with related 
descriptions and estimated revenue effects, is included in the 
President's Budget. Without including tax expenditures in the 
inventory, OMB forgoes an important opportunity to increase the 
transparency of tax expenditures and the outcomes to which they 
contribute. 

The Ability to Find and Sort Similar Programs or Programs Contributing 
to Shared Outcomes Would Enhance the Usefulness of Inventories: 

As noted earlier, GPRAMA requires OMB to publish the federal program 
inventory on Performance.gov. While the inventories published in May 
2013 were individual agency documents, OMB's guidance and staff have 
stated that eventually the inventory would move to a more dynamic, web-
based approach--originally planned for the May 2014 update and now on 
hold. This web-based approach could make it easier to tag and sort 
related or similar programs. For instance, OMB's plans to have 
agencies tag each of their programs by one or more program type in a 
future iteration of the inventory would provide a sorting capability 
for identifying the same type of program. By providing a sorting 
mechanism by program type, OMB could help address one of our open 
recommendations, described in the text box below, by identifying (1) 
all programs in a given type, and (2) of those programs, any that have 
developed strategies to effectively overcome measurement challenges. 

Text box: 

GAO Recommended OMB and the PIC Develop a Detailed Approach to Examine 
and Address Long-standing Performance Measurement Challenges: 

In our June 2013 report, Managing for Results: Executive Branch Should 
More Fully Implement the GPRA Modernization Act to Address Pressing 
Governance Challenges (GAO-13-518), we found that agencies continue to 
face common, long-standing difficulties in measuring the performance 
of various types of federal programs and activities--contracts, direct 
services, grants, regulations, research and development, and tax 
expenditures. We recommended the Director of OMB work with the PIC to 
develop a detailed approach to examine these difficulties across 
agencies, including identifying and sharing any promising practices 
from agencies that have overcome difficulties in measuring the 
performance of these program types. In commenting on a draft of the 
report, OMB staff agreed with this recommendation. As of July 2014, 
OMB and the PIC have taken some initial steps to address this 
recommendation. According to OMB staff, this includes efforts related 
to achieving several of the CAP goals. For example, the "Benchmark and 
Improve Mission-Support Operations" CAP goal involves developing 
common standards and benchmarks to measure the performance and cost of 
various agency administrative operations, such as information 
technology and acquisition management. In addition, PIC staff told us 
they have taken initial steps to address performance measurement 
issues in a few areas, including a pilot effort focused on 
acquisitions (contracts). PIC staff said they plan to expand the model 
to focus on other types of programs with performance measurement 
issues, such as grants and regulations. We will continue to monitor 
progress. 

Source: GAO, OMB, and PIC. GAO-15-83. 

[End of text box] 

As highlighted in OMB's guidance, the federal program inventory has 
the potential to facilitate coordination across programs by making it 
easier to find programs that may contribute to a shared goal or a 
common outcome. This could also help identify and address instances of 
fragmentation, overlap, and duplication. In its guidance for the 2014 
update before it was put on hold, OMB intended for agencies to link 
each program to the existing web pages on Performance.gov for 
strategic goals, strategic objectives, APGs, and CAP goals. According 
to OMB staff, once they move forward with the next inventory update 
and move to a web-based presentation, this would allow users to sort 
programs by the goals to which they contribute. This approach also 
would allow users to identify programs that contribute to broader 
themes on Performance.gov. The themes generally align with budget 
functions from the President's Budget and include administration of 
justice; general science, space, and technology; national defense; and 
transportation, among others. Currently, the themes can be used to 
sort goals on Performance.gov that contribute to those broad themes. 

Conclusions: 

The coordinated efforts of multiple federal agencies, different levels 
of government, and sectors are generally needed to achieve meaningful 
results. This is underscored by our annual reports on fragmentation, 
overlap, and duplication, which to date have identified over 90 areas, 
each of which involves a patchwork of federal agencies, programs, and 
activities that attempt to address the same issue. Executive branch 
and congressional efforts to identify, manage, or resolve instances of 
fragmentation, overlap, and duplication are hindered by the lack of a 
comprehensive list of all federal programs. Such a list, along with 
related budget and performance information, could help decision makers 
determine the scope of the federal government's involvement, 
investment, and performance in a particular area, which in turn could 
help pinpoint where action is needed to better address or avoid 
fragmentation, overlap, and duplication. Therefore, effective 
implementation of GPRAMA's federal program inventory requirements 
could provide decision makers with critical information that could be 
used to better address crosscutting issues, among other purposes. 

The executive branch has taken some initial steps to develop program 
inventories with related budget and performance information. In 2012, 
OMB involved 11 agencies in a pilot program inventory effort for 
federal trade, export, and competitiveness programs and subsequently 
developed guidance--based on lessons learned from the pilot--for 
broader implementation at 24 agencies. In May 2013, the 24 agencies 
published inventories, providing information about 1,524 programs they 
collectively identified. Despite these initial efforts, we have 
identified a number of areas where implementation should be improved. 

OMB needs to take further actions to effectively meet GPRAMA's 
requirement for the inventories to present a coherent picture of all 
federal programs. First, OMB's guidance provides agencies with 
flexibility in how they defined their programs. As a result, agencies 
used different approaches to identify their programs, which, in turn, 
led to a lack of comparability for similar programs across agencies. 
This was illustrated by our analysis of agency inventories for STEM 
education and nuclear nonproliferation programs, in which we could 
only exactly match a small fraction of the programs covered by our 
past work on fragmentation, overlap, and duplication in those areas. 
According to OMB staff, the flexibility provided in guidance is 
derived from lessons learned from the pilot effort--that agencies are 
different for valid and legitimate reasons and a one-size-fits-all 
approach would not work for all agencies. While this may be true, OMB 
could do more to direct agencies to find common ground on similar 
programs. One of OMB's stated purposes for the inventories is to 
facilitate coordination across programs that contribute to similar 
outcomes. However, as we discovered through our interviews with agency 
officials involved with the inventory efforts, none of the agencies 
sought input from other agencies on how they defined and identified 
their programs. If agencies worked together to more consistently 
define their programs, it could also help them identify where they 
have programs that contribute to similar outcomes, and therefore 
opportunities to collaborate. 

Second, OMB's plans to date do not adequately ensure that the 
inventories include all federal programs. It has yet to provide firm 
plans on when implementation of GPRAMA's inventory requirements will 
be expanded beyond the current 24 agencies. OMB's guidance does not 
provide a clear time frame for how long activities must persist to be 
considered programs, which may have resulted in agencies excluding 
certain activities from their inventories. In addition, OMB did not 
include tax expenditures in the inventory effort. Although GPRAMA does 
not specify that tax expenditures should be included in the program 
inventory, our work over the past 20 years has shown the need for tax 
expenditures to be held to the same scrutiny as spending programs, 
given the sizable federal investment they represent. The omission of 
these agencies, programs, and activities severely limits the 
usefulness of the inventory as a tool for addressing crosscutting 
issues. 

In addition, other factors limit the usefulness of the inventory as a 
source of information for decision makers. To be useful, information 
must meet various users' needs for accuracy, completeness, 
consistency, reliability, and validity, among other factors. Agency 
officials also told us they did not consult with external 
stakeholders, including Congress. Although OMB's 2012 guidance 
instructed agencies to seek this input, none of them did. 
Subsequently, OMB has removed this direction from its guidance. By 
consulting with stakeholders to understand their needs, agencies would 
better ensure that the information provided in the inventories is 
useful for stakeholder decision making. Involving congressional 
stakeholders is of critical importance given Congress's power to 
create and fund programs. 

Our work also identified limitations with the performance information 
contained within the inventories. Agencies did not consistently 
identify the strategic goals, strategic objectives, agency priority 
goals, and cross-agency priority goals that each program supports, as 
directed by OMB guidance. These omissions were not always identified 
during OMB's review of each agency's inventory. In addition, OMB's 
guidance does not direct agencies to identify in their inventories the 
performance goals to which each program contributes. Although not 
required for the inventories, GPRAMA requires this type of connection-
-albeit by performance goal rather than by program--in agency 
performance plans. This information can help Congress and others 
understand and assess the relationship between the agency's resources 
and results. Without it, it will be difficult for Congress to assess 
the likelihood of the agency's success in achieving intended results. 

Recommendations for Executive Action: 

To ensure the effective implementation of federal program inventory 
requirements and to make the inventories more useful, we make the 
following eight recommendations to the Director of the Office of 
Management and Budget. 

To better present a more coherent picture of all federal programs, we 
recommend the Director of OMB take the following five actions: 

* revise relevant guidance to: 

- direct agencies to collaborate with each other in defining and 
identifying programs that contribute to common outcomes, and: 

- provide a time frame for what constitutes "persistent over time" 
that agencies can use as a decision rule for whether to include short-
term efforts as programs; 

* define plans for when additional agencies will be required to 
develop program inventories; and: 

* include tax expenditures in the federal program inventory effort by: 

- designating tax expenditure as a program type in relevant guidance, 
and: 

- developing, in coordination with the Secretary of the Treasury, a 
tax expenditure inventory that identifies each tax expenditure and 
provides a description of how the tax expenditure is defined, its 
purpose, and related performance and budget information. 

To help ensure that the information agencies provide in their 
inventories is useful to federal decision makers and key stakeholders, 
and to provide greater transparency and ensure consistency in federal 
program funding and performance information, we recommend the Director 
of OMB take the following three actions: 

* revise relevant guidance to direct agencies to: 

- consult with relevant congressional committees and stakeholders on 
their program definition approach and identified programs when 
developing or updating their inventories, and: 

- identify in their inventories the performance goal(s) to which each 
program contributes; and: 

* ensure, during OMB reviews of inventories, that agencies 
consistently identify, as applicable, the strategic goals, strategic 
objectives, agency priority goals, and cross-agency priority goals 
each program supports. 

Agency Comments: 

We provided a draft of this report for review and comment to the 
Director of OMB and the 24 agencies that developed program inventories. 

In oral comments provided on October 15, 2014, staff from OMB's Office 
of Performance and Personnel Management stated that they agreed with 
five of our eight recommendations and would consider how to implement 
those recommendations as they move forward with merging program 
inventory implementation with that of the DATA Act. For the other 
three recommendations--designating tax expenditures as a type of 
program, developing an inventory of tax expenditures, and directing 
agencies to identify how their programs contribute to their 
performance goals--OMB staff neither agreed nor disagreed. OMB staff 
told us that until they had firmer plans on how program inventory and 
DATA Act implementation would be merged, they could not determine if 
implementing these three recommendations would be feasible. 

We also received technical comments from OMB, the Departments of 
Energy and State, and the National Aeronautics and Space 
Administration, which we incorporated as appropriate. 

We are sending copies of this report to the Director of OMB and the 
heads of the 24 agencies that developed program inventories as well as 
interested congressional committees and other interested parties. This 
report will also be available at no charge on the GAO website at 
[hyperlink, http://www.gao.gov]. 

If you or your staff have any questions about this report, please 
contact me at (202) 512-6806 or mihmj@gao.gov. Contact points for our 
Offices of Congressional Relations and Public Affairs may be found on 
the last page of our report. Key contributors to this report are 
listed in appendix II. 

Signed by: 

J. Christopher Mihm: 
Managing Director, Strategic Issues: 

[End of section] 

Appendix I: Objectives, Scope & Methodology: 

The GPRA Modernization Act of 2010 (GPRAMA) requires us to review 
implementation of the act at several critical junctures.[Footnote 44] 
This report is part of our response to that mandate. Our specific 
objectives for this report were to (1) assess how OMB and agencies 
defined and identified the programs contained in the inventories, (2) 
examine the extent to which the inventories provide useful information 
for federal decision makers, and (3) examine the extent to which the 
inventories provide a coherent picture of the scope of federal 
involvement in particular areas. 

To address all three objectives, we assessed the implementation of 
relevant GPRAMA requirements by the Office of Management and Budget 
(OMB) and the 24 agencies that developed program inventories, which 
were published on Performance.gov in May 2013.[Footnote 45] GPRAMA 
requires OMB to make publicly available on a central governmentwide 
website, a list of all federal programs identified by agencies. For 
each program, the agency is to provide to OMB for publication: 

* an identification of how the agency defines the term "program," 
consistent with OMB guidance, including program activities that were 
aggregated, disaggregated, or consolidated to be considered a program 
by the agency; 

* a description of the purposes of the program and how the program 
contributes to the agency's mission and goals; and: 

* an identification of funding for the current fiscal year and the 
previous 2 fiscal years.[Footnote 46] 

GPRAMA also requires OMB to issue guidance to ensure that the 
information provided on the website presents a coherent picture of all 
federal programs.[Footnote 47] 

We also assessed program inventory implementation based on relevant 
OMB guidance (Circular No. A-11, Part 6) and related leading practices 
from our past work on managing for results, such as those related to 
involving Congress and stakeholders in performance management 
activities and ensuring performance information is useful to decision 
makers.[Footnote 48] In addition, we developed a structured set of 
questions and conducted interviews with, or received written responses 
from, officials involved in developing the inventories at the 24 
agencies. We also interviewed staff from OMB's Office of Performance 
and Personnel Management who led governmentwide implementation of 
these requirements and developed guidance for agencies. 

Additionally, to address our first objective, we selected two areas of 
fragmentation, overlap, and duplication from our annual reports--
science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and 
nuclear nonproliferation programs--and compared the lists of programs 
developed by our work to those contained in agency inventories. To 
select these two areas, we first reviewed the existing body of 83 
areas of fragmentation, overlap, and duplication published in our 
2011, 2012, and 2013 annual reports,[Footnote 49] and identified and 
eliminated from selection 23 areas that focused on management 
functions, since they were unlikely to be captured in the program 
inventories. For the remaining 60 areas, we identified the number of 
agencies involved in the area as reported in our past worked, whether 
those agencies had developed and published an inventory in May 2013, 
and whether the area primarily involved domestic or foreign 
assistance/national security programs--to ensure diversity among the 
agencies and programs we reviewed. Finally, we sorted those lists to 
select the areas with the most agencies involved in them: STEM 
education for domestic programs and nuclear nonproliferation programs 
for foreign assistance/national security programs. 

We compared the lists of programs developed from our past work on STEM 
education and nuclear nonproliferation to those contained in the 
relevant agencies' inventories.[Footnote 50] We identified possible 
matches in two different manners. First, we identified instances in 
which program names exactly matched between the lists developed for 
our past work and the agency's inventory. In addition, we also 
reviewed the program descriptions contained in the relevant 
inventories to determine if they would lead one to programs/activities 
related to STEM education or nuclear nonproliferation. For example, if 
the program description contained language such as "science education" 
or "technology education," we included that program as a broader 
match. In some instances, we were also able to identify programs from 
our past work listed as activities within the program descriptions in 
relevant inventories. To ensure consistency in this analysis, the work 
to identify programs conducted by one analyst was reviewed and 
verified by another analyst. 

Because the two selected areas are a non-generalizable sample of 
instances where fragmentation, overlap, and duplication exist, our 
results cannot be generalized more broadly. However, the results of 
our analysis illustrate how various approaches to defining programs 
can lead to differences in how programs are identified. 

We conducted this performance audit from August 2013 to October 2014 
in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards. 
Those standards require that we plan and perform the audit to obtain 
sufficient, appropriate evidence to provide a reasonable basis for our 
findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives. We believe 
that the evidence obtained provides a reasonable basis for our 
findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives. 

[End of section] 

Appendix II: Staff Acknowledgments: 

GAO Contact: 

J. Christopher Mihm, (202) 512-6806 or mihmj@gao.gov: 

Staff Acknowledgments: 

In addition to the above contact, Lisa M. Pearson (Assistant Director) 
and Benjamin T. Licht supervised this review and the development of 
the resulting report. Gerard Burke, Amy Bush, Virginia Chanley, A. 
Nicole Clowers, Karin Fangman, Heather Krause, and Steven Putansu made 
significant contributions to this report. Carole J. Cimitile, Dewi 
Djunaidy, Emily Gruenwald, Donna Miller, Leah Q. Nash, and Erinn L. 
Sauer also provided key contributions. 

[End of section] 

Footnotes: 

[1] GAO, 2014 Annual Report: Additional Opportunities to Reduce 
Fragmentation, Overlap, and Duplication and Achieve Other Financial 
Benefits, [hyperlink, http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-14-343SP] 
(Washington, D.C.: Apr. 8, 2014); 2013 Annual Report: Actions Needed 
to Reduce Fragmentation, Overlap, and Duplication and Achieve Other 
Financial Benefits, [hyperlink, 
http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-13-279SP] (Washington, D.C.: Apr. 9, 
2013); 2012 Annual Report: Opportunities to Reduce Duplication, 
Overlap and Fragmentation, Achieve Savings, and Enhance Revenue, 
[hyperlink, http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-12-342SP] (Washington, 
D.C.: Feb. 28, 2012); and Opportunities to Reduce Potential 
Duplication in Government Programs, Save Tax Dollars, and Enhance 
Revenue, [hyperlink, http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-11-318SP] 
(Washington, D.C.: Mar. 1, 2011). For additional information about 
this body of work, see [hyperlink, http://www.gao.gov/duplication]. 

[2] Pub. L. No. 111-352, 124 Stat. 3866 (Jan. 4, 2011). The acronym 
"GPRA" in the act's title refers to the Government Performance and 
Results Act of 1993. Pub. L. No. 103-62, 107 Stat. 285 (Aug. 3, 1993). 

[3] 31 U.S.C. § 1122. 

[4] Pub. L. No. 111-352, § 15. For our report reviewing initial 
implementation of GPRAMA, see GAO, Managing for Results: Executive 
Branch Should More Fully Implement the GPRA Modernization Act to 
Address Pressing Governance Challenges, [hyperlink, 
http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-13-518] (Washington, D.C.: Jun. 26, 
2013). Other reports issued pursuant to this mandate include GAO, 
Managing for Results: Agencies' Trends in the Use of Performance 
Information to Make Decisions, [hyperlink, 
http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-14-747] (Washington, D.C.: Sep. 26, 
2014); Managing for Results: Enhanced Goal Leader Accountability and 
Collaboration Could Further Improve Agency Performance, [hyperlink, 
http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-14-639] (Washington, D.C.: Jul. 22, 
2014); Managing for Results: OMB Should Strengthen Reviews of Cross-
Agency Goals, [hyperlink, http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-14-526] 
(Washington, D.C.: Jun. 12, 2014); and Managing for Results: 
Implementation Approaches Used to Enhance Collaboration in Interagency 
Groups, [hyperlink, http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-14-220] 
(Washington, D.C.: Feb. 14, 2014). 

[5] See, for example, GAO, Managing for Results: A Guide for Using the 
GPRA Modernization Act to Help Inform Congressional Decision Making, 
[hyperlink, http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-12-621SP] (Washington, 
D.C.: Jun. 15, 2012), and Managing for Results: Enhancing Agency Use 
of Performance Information for Management Decision Making, [hyperlink, 
http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-05-927] (Washington, D.C.: Sep. 9, 
2005). 

[6] [hyperlink, http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-13-279SP], [hyperlink, 
http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-12-342SP], and [hyperlink, 
http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-11-318SP]. 

[7] 31 U.S.C. § 1122(a)(2). 

[8] 31 U.S.C. § 1122(d). 

[9] OMB, Inventory of Government Programs: Trade, Export, and 
Competitiveness Pilot, M-12-07 (Washington, D.C.: Jan. 13, 2012). This 
effort included the Department of Commerce, U.S. Trade Representative, 
U.S. Trade Development Agency, Export-Import Bank, Overseas Private 
Investment Corporation, and Small Business Administration as well as 
agencies/subcomponents within the Departments of Agriculture, Health 
and Human Services, Labor, and the Treasury, and the National Science 
Foundation. 

[10] OMB, Circular No. A-11, Preparation, Submission and Execution of 
the Budget, pt 6 (August 2012). OMB updated this guidance in its July 
2013 and July 2014 revisions to Circular No. A-11. 

[11] These agencies are the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, 
Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland 
Security, Housing and Urban Development, the Interior, Justice, Labor, 
State, Transportation, the Treasury, and Veterans Affairs, as well as 
the U.S. Agency for International Development, U.S. Army Corps of 
Engineers--Civil Works Program, Environmental Protection Agency, 
General Services Administration, National Aeronautics and Space 
Administration, National Science Foundation, Office of Personnel 
Management, Small Business Administration, and Social Security 
Administration. 

[12] Performance.gov has been funded through the E-Government Fund, 
which consists of funding appropriated by Congress every year. The E-
Government Fund was established by the E-Government Act of 2002 to 
support projects that enable the federal government to expand its 
ability, through the development and implementation of innovative uses 
of the Internet or other electronic methods, to conduct activities 
electronically. Pub. L. No. 107-347, § 101,116 Stat. 2899, 2906 (Dec. 
17, 2002). 44. U.S.C. § 3604. 

[13] Pub. L. No. 113-101, 128 Stat. 1146 (May 9, 2014). The DATA Act 
amends the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 
2006, Pub. L. No. 109-282, 120 Stat. 1186 (Sep. 26, 2006). 

[14] GAO, Government Efficiency and Effectiveness: Opportunities to 
Reduce Fragmentation, Overlap, and Duplication and Achieve Other 
Financial Benefits, [hyperlink, 
http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-14-478T] (Washington, D.C.: Apr. 8, 
2014). 

[15] 31 U.S.C. § 1122(a)(2)(A). 

[16] GAO, A Glossary of Terms Used in the Federal Budget Process, 
[hyperlink, http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-05-734SP] (Washington, 
D.C.: September 2005). 

[17] OMB, Circular No. A-11, pt 6, § 280.3 (2012). 

[18] Both of these areas were highlighted in our 2012 annual report, 
[hyperlink, http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-12-342SP]. In May 2014, we 
updated our work on STEM education programs. See GAO, Science, 
Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education: Assessing the 
Relationship between Education and the Workforce, [hyperlink, 
http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-14-374] (Washington, D.C.: May 8, 
2014). For additional information about nuclear nonproliferation 
programs identified in our past work, see GAO, Nuclear 
Nonproliferation: Action Needed to Address NNSA's Program Management 
and Coordination Challenges, [hyperlink, 
http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-12-71] (Washington, D.C.: Dec. 14, 
2011). 

[19] OMB, Circular No. A-11, p. 6, § 280.3 (2012). 

[20] [hyperlink, http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-05-927]. To identify 
practices that can facilitate the use of performance information in 
this September 2005 report, we reviewed relevant literature, including 
our previous reports, spoke to experts in using performance 
information, and held group discussions with federal program managers. 

[21] 31 U.S.C. § 1122(a)(2)(A). "Program activity" is defined as a 
specific activity or project as listed in the program and financing 
schedules of the annual budget of the United States Government. 31 
U.S.C. § 1115(h)(11). 

[22] 31 U.S.C. § 1122(a)(2)(C). 

[23] 31 U.S.C. § 1122(a)(2)(B). 

[24] For the 7 inventories that did not consistently identify these 
contributions, 5 showed how some, but not all, of their programs 
supported agency strategic goals, while 2 did not provide this 
information at all. 

[25] For the 13 inventories that did not consistently identify these 
contributions, 7 showed how some, but not all, of their programs 
supported agency strategic objectives, while 6 did not provide this 
information at all. 

[26] 31 U.S.C. § 1122(b)(3)(C), (c)(6). 

[27] [hyperlink, http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-13-279SP]. 

[28] GAO, Managing for Results: Agencies Should More Fully Develop 
Priority Goals under the GPRA Modernization Act, [hyperlink, 
http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-13-174] (Washington, D.C.: Apr. 19, 
2013) and Managing for Results: GAO's Work Related to the Interim 
Crosscutting Priority Goals under the GPRA Modernization Act, 
[hyperlink, http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-12-620R] (Washington, 
D.C.: May 31, 2012). 

[29] 31 U.S.C. §§ 1121 and 1122. 

[30] 31 U.S.C. § 1121. 

[31] GAO, Government Efficiency and Effectiveness: Views on the 
Progress and Plans for Addressing Government-wide Management 
Challenges, [hyperlink, http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-14-436T] 
(Washington, D.C.: Mar. 12, 2014). 

[32] [hyperlink, http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-14-526] and GAO, 
Managing for Results: Data-Driven Performance Reviews Show Promise But 
Agencies Should Explore How to Involve Other Relevant Agencies, 
[hyperlink, http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-13-228] (Washington, D.C.: 
Feb. 27, 2013). 

[33] 31 U.S.C. § 1115(b)(5)(C). 

[34] Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, GPRA 
Modernization Act of 2010, S. Rep. No. 111-372 (2010), at 6. 

[35] Pub. L. No. 111-352, § 10. 

[36] [hyperlink, http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-14-436T]. 

[37] See, for example, [hyperlink, 
http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-13-518]; [hyperlink, 
http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-13-174]; [hyperlink, 
http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-12-621SP]; GAO, Performance Budgeting: 
PART Focuses Attention on Program Performance, but More Can Be Done to 
Engage Congress, [hyperlink, http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-06-28] 
(Washington, D.C.: Oct. 28, 2005); Managing For Results: Enhancing the 
Usefulness of GPRA Consultations Between the Executive Branch and 
Congress, [hyperlink, http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO/T-GGD-97-56] 
(Washington, D.C.: Mar. 10, 1997); and Executive Guide: Effectively 
Implementing the Government Performance and Results Act, [hyperlink, 
http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO/GGD-96-118] (Washington, D.C.: June 
1996). 

[38] 31 U.S.C. § 1122(d). 

[39] OMB, Circular No. A-11, pt. 6, § 280.12 (2012). 

[40] Tax expenditures are reductions in a taxpayer's tax liability 
that are the result of special exemptions and exclusions from 
taxation, deductions, credits, deferrals of tax liability, or 
preferential tax rates. For more information, see our key issues page 
on tax expenditures at [hyperlink, 
http://www.gao.gov/key_issues/tax_expenditures]. 

[41] [hyperlink, http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-13-518]. 

[42] 31 U.S.C. § 1115(a)(2). 

[43] For our May 2012, June 2013, and June 2014 reports on CAP goals, 
see [hyperlink, http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-12-620R], [hyperlink, 
http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-13-518], and [hyperlink, 
http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-14-526], respectively. We reported on 
APGs in April 2013 and July 2014. See [hyperlink, 
http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-13-174] and [hyperlink, 
http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-14-639], respectively. 

[44] Pub. L. No. 111-352, § 15. For our report reviewing initial 
implementation of GPRAMA, see [hyperlink, 
http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-13-518]. 

[45] The 24 agencies directed by OMB to develop program inventories 
are the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, 
Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and 
Urban Development, the Interior, Justice, Labor, State, 
Transportation, the Treasury, and Veterans Affairs, as well as the 
U.S. Agency for International Development, U.S. Army Corps of 
Engineers--Civil Works Program, Environmental Protection Agency, 
General Services Administration, National Aeronautics and Space 
Administration, National Science Foundation, Office of Personnel 
Management, Small Business Administration, and Social Security 
Administration. 

[46] 31 U.S.C. § 1122(a)(2). 

[47] 31 U.S.C. § 1122(d). 

[48] See, for example, [hyperlink, 
http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-12-621SP] and [hyperlink, 
http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-05-927]. 

[49] [hyperlink, http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-13-279SP], 
[hyperlink, http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-12-342SP], and [hyperlink, 
http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-11-318SP].  

[50] Both of these areas were highlighted in our 2012 annual report, 
[hyperlink, http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-12-342SP]. In May 2014, we 
updated our work on STEM education programs. See [hyperlink, 
http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-14-374]. For additional information 
about nuclear nonproliferation programs identified in our past work, 
see [hyperlink, http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-12-71].

[End of section] 

GAO's Mission: 

The Government Accountability Office, the audit, evaluation, and 
investigative arm of Congress, exists to support Congress in meeting 
its constitutional responsibilities and to help improve the 
performance and accountability of the federal government for the 
American people. GAO examines the use of public funds; evaluates 
federal programs and policies; and provides analyses, recommendations, 
and other assistance to help Congress make informed oversight, policy, 
and funding decisions. GAO's commitment to good government is 
reflected in its core values of accountability, integrity, and 
reliability. 

Obtaining Copies of GAO Reports and Testimony: 

The fastest and easiest way to obtain copies of GAO documents at no 
cost is through GAO's website [hyperlink, http://www.gao.gov]. Each 
weekday afternoon, GAO posts on its website newly released reports, 
testimony, and correspondence. To have GAO e-mail you a list of newly 
posted products, go to [hyperlink, http://www.gao.gov] and select 
"E-mail Updates." 

Order by Phone: 

The price of each GAO publication reflects GAO's actual cost of 
production and distribution and depends on the number of pages in the 
publication and whether the publication is printed in color or black 
and white. Pricing and ordering information is posted on GAO's 
website, [hyperlink, http://www.gao.gov/ordering.htm]. 

Place orders by calling (202) 512-6000, toll free (866) 801-7077, or 
TDD (202) 512-2537. 

Orders may be paid for using American Express, Discover Card, 
MasterCard, Visa, check, or money order. Call for additional 
information. 

Connect with GAO: 

Connect with GAO on facebook, flickr, twitter, and YouTube.
Subscribe to our RSS Feeds or E mail Updates. Listen to our Podcasts.
Visit GAO on the web at [hyperlink, http://www.gao.gov]. 

To Report Fraud, Waste, and Abuse in Federal Programs: 

Contact: 
Website: [hyperlink, http://www.gao.gov/fraudnet/fraudnet.htm]; 
E-mail: fraudnet@gao.gov; 
Automated answering system: (800) 424-5454 or (202) 512-7470. 

Congressional Relations: 

Katherine Siggerud, Managing Director, siggerudk@gao.gov: 
(202) 512-4400: 
U.S. Government Accountability Office: 
441 G Street NW, Room 7125: 
Washington, DC 20548. 

Public Affairs: 

Chuck Young, Managing Director, youngc1@gao.gov: 
(202) 512-4800: 
U.S. Government Accountability Office: 
441 G Street NW, Room 7149: 
Washington, DC 20548. 

[End of document]