The government needs to do more to measure agency performance

Guest:	Lori Atkinson
Title:	Acting director for strategic issues at GAO
Summary:	Knowing whether a program is succeeding requires more than good intentions. It requires a disciplined look at results. Congress strengthened federal performance-management requirements in 2024, but a new GAO review finds important pieces still haven't been fully implemented.

The Federal Drive with Terry Gerton provides expert insights on current events in the federal community. Read more interviews to keep up with daily news and analysis that affect the federal workforce. Reach out to Terry and the Federal Drive producers with feedback and story ideas at FederalDrive@federalnewsnetwork.com.

Interview transcript

Terry Gerton We’re going to talk about government agency performance. Congress created a new requirement for performance management in 2024, the Federal Agency Performance Act. Before we jump into what GAO found as you looked at this, how does this fit in with the other sorts of performance legislation like GPRA, GPRAMA?

Lori Atkinson So this new legislation was an attempt to modernize the current performance management for the federal government. It did things like it required OMB to establish cross-cutting goals within the first year of an administration. It also codified the requirement for agencies to conduct annual strategic reviews to assess whether programs are achieving or contributing to agency goals.

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Terry Gerton And that topic of strategic review comes up quite a bit in this report. When you’re looking at that, what are you actually looking for agencies to do? And why do you think it’s such an important management tool?

Lori Atkinson So strategic reviews sometimes sounds like a bureaucratic paper exercise, but strategic reviews are really meant to be decision-making tools. And so what we were looking for in this particular review was we were looking at the guidance that OMB had established for the strategic reviews. We were looking to see, you know, how much of the guidance had been provided to agencies. So we think of OMB as like a central steering committee. Creating a blueprint for agencies, other federal agencies to conduct these strategic reviews. The guidance that OMB provided should help build the structure that the agencies are doing for their strategic reviews, what’s to be included, what they should be considering as part of the reviews. But what happened, what we found, was that OMB had omitted part of the guidance. So the blueprint that went out to the agencies to build the strategic reviews were missing a couple of the requirements from the law. And so that’s where some of our recommendations were around updating the guidance to include all the aspects of the law

Terry Gerton OMB has been doing annual reviews with agencies for a few years. What are the new requirements in this law and what was missing from the guidance?

Lori Atkinson So what was missing from the guidance, really, from OMB’s perspective, were four different aspects, and a lot of it was around leadership involvement and that was part of what was missing, also stakeholder engagement, documentation standards. And then the fourth thing that OMB guidance was missing was how agencies should assess risk and evidence as part of the strategic reviews. So, all of this, you know, when you’re missing pieces of it, it can result in the strategic reviews not being as robust and not helping the agencies accomplish really what the strategic reviews are intended to do, which is for leadership to have the information they need to make decisions. What’s working well, what’s not working well? What needs to be adjusted, perhaps.

Terry Gerton Does the law require that OMB follow up on this to get the feedback from agency strategic reviews?

Lori Atkinson So we looked at four agencies as part of our review, DHS, Treasury, State, and GSA, and we found that they had not fully implemented the law as well, and they were missing, in some cases — DHS for example, DHS and Treasury were missing parts of the guidance as well but in the case of State and GSA they had done not any of the guidance and they were missing large pieces of it. So, when we talked with the agencies, they did confirm that they really rely on OMB’s guidance for creating their own. And so what happens when they’re missing the guidance, they run the risk of the strategic reviews don’t provide the opportunity that they’re intended to do. They don’t allow for full implementation of the law because they’re missing big pieces of the guidance.

Terry Gerton Lori Atkinson is acting director of strategic issues at GAO. So Lori, those are four big agencies. They all have pretty significant agency overhead and strategic planning shops. They should know how to do this. Is there something else they’re doing that could be co-opted into this strategic review? Are they getting close in other ways?

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Lori Atkinson DHS, Treasury and GSA all conducted strategic reviews in 2025, but you may have noted that State did not do a strategic review in 2025. And so, our recommendation was that they do a strategic review in 2026. And … State agreed that they would be doing that review. So they are doing, the agencies that we looked at either have done the reviews or have plans to do the 2026 reviews, which is important because without those reviews, they’re really missing opportunities to improve how government’s working for the taxpayer.

Terry Gerton And one of the things that really stood out to me was the emphasis here on bringing in people beyond the immediate program offices. You want to bring in data officers and evaluation officials and even some outside stakeholders. Why is that broader participation so important to getting these strategic reviews right into really getting a feel for agency performance?

Lori Atkinson So when you think of a strategic review as being more than a paperwork exercise and really providing key information on how the agency’s performing and how effective the agency is in achieving its goals, it’s important that the leadership is involved and you have leadership perspective and also key to that are stakeholders because, without their involvement, you could be missing key information that can really inform the effectiveness of the strategic reviews and helping to address some of the biggest problems the government face, which are big cross-cutting issues, cross-agency issues that have been longstanding in some cases, like cybersecurity.

Terry Gerton That cross-cutting issue really is the theme here, trying to figure out how agencies talk to each other and really move forward on these complicated issues. If you’re gonna bring stakeholders into that, how do you reach out and bring them in? Did you see any of these agencies do that well?

Lori Atkinson So crosscutting agency issues have been a longstanding problem. GAO has reported on this topic for several years. And it’s a theme also in our duplication, overlap and fragmentation reports that we produce annually. And so there have been some efforts to address some of these issues, but they still remain a challenge for the federal government. And it is because multiple stakeholders are involved in that collaboration aspect.

Terry Gerton There are seven recommendations in the report. If you rank order them, maybe top to bottom, what are the most important things that you’d like to see some progress on to really improve this strategic review process?

Lori Atkinson So, you know, we think all the recommendations are important and need to be implemented, but, of course, starting at the top with OMB and providing the fulsome guidance to address all the requirements and the law would be where I would say we want to first start. Because, as I mentioned earlier, if you think about OMB as like a central steering committee and providing a blueprint to the rest of the federal government, you want to make sure that blueprint’s complete. And so, you know, that would be where we would want to see the initial stages. We also think it’s important for the State Department to do a strategic review in 2026. Going two years without a review would be like flying blind without having the information that’s key to how the agency is performing. And then, you know, of course, we want to see the other agencies we looked at update their guidance as well.

Terry Gerton If we get these all together, if we start doing the strategic reviews, according to the law and agencies are really engaged in this, what would you expect to look different in the future?

Lori Atkinson Well, what we what we hope is that, you know, when the strategic reviews are a leadership priority and they are taken as more than just a paperwork exercise, we hope that they are opportunities to help improve how government’s working for taxpayers. You know, our recommendations are really intended to help the agencies fully implement the law as it was intended. And by doing that, strengthening performance management can help effectively manage these big complex challenges that are cross agency that the government’s facing, like cybersecurity, disaster relief, and other challenges.

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