The March 31 deadline for federal agencies' first-ever annual reports-documents that tell Congress and the public how well the government performed last year-passed on Friday with some agencies delivering their reports to Congress and others apparently missing the mark.
The Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, which will be evaluating all major agencies' efforts, received annual reports from the departments of Defense, Education, Health and Human Services. The Social Security Administration, National Science Foundation, Office of Management and Budget and U.S. Agency for International Development also delivered their reports to the committee.
The departments of Energy, Interior, and Treasury, as well as the Office of Personnel Management, NASA, and National Archives and Records Administration released their reports and posted them to their Web sites. The Transportation Department scheduled a press conference for Monday to announce the results of its report. The Commerce Department also released its report.
The reports mark the culmination of the first complete cycle of the Government Performance and Results Act, a 1993 law that required agencies to write strategic plans, annual performance plans and annual performance reports. Agencies wrote their first annual performance plans for fiscal 1999. The reports due Friday explain whether agencies met the goals in their plans.
"These performance reports will provide the Congress a real chance to judge the effectiveness of the programs it put in place," said Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., chairman of the Governmental Affairs Committee.
Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., the ranking member of the committee, chastised agencies that failed to meet the deadline.
""Unfortunately, some agencies are not meeting the expectations of the law," Lieberman said, adding that "a major concern is the validity of the data some agencies are relying upon in their initial reports, and we will need to ensure that improvements are made."
As an example of data problems, Thompson criticized the Office of Management and Budget for claiming in its performance report that it had helped 18 agencies earn clean opinions on their annual financial statements for 1999. Only 13 agencies have earned clean opinions so far.
OMB apologized for the error. OMB official Charles Kieffer, in a letter to Thompson, said the mistake was an editing error.
Taken together, the annual reports present a picture of the federal government's performance. The Interior Department, for example, announced a 67 percent success rate on its performance goals. "Developing realistic goals and measures for Interior's varied programs is challenging. Since 1999, we realized that we had too many goals and measures, and many needed improvement," the department explained.
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