Congress urged to link agency budgets to results

Leaders of Congressional oversight committees need to combine forces with appropriations and authorization committees in order to put some teeth behind the 1993 law that requires federal agencies to report on their performance, a House lawmaker suggested Thursday.

Under the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA), agencies are required to set performance goals each year and then report on whether they met their goals. Although the law is seven years old, the first full cycle of reports went to Congress earlier this year.

Evaluations of the first full round of GPRA have been tepid, with the General Accounting Office reporting that agencies don't provide credible performance information and the Office of Management and Budget admitting that agencies are still on a GPRA learning curve.

Rep. Stephen Horn, R-Calif., suggested that getting lawmakers who hold the purse strings together with federal leaders might be one way to make leaders pay more attention to the Results Act.

"We need to get together a dialogue of principals, not just of staff," said Horn, who chairs the House Government Reform Subcommittee on Government Management, Information and Technology, said at a hearing before his committee.

Republican leaders were in agreement that more needs to be done to encourage full GPRA compliance. House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, said Congress needs to "step it up" to another level of oversight. Lawmakers need to continue to encourage agencies, "but we must at this point be a little demanding," he said.

Meanwhile, Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, said that in his experience, federal managers view the Results Act as a burden. They treat it as "just another hoop to jump through," he said.