Subject:
Hearing on Implementation of the Government Performance and Results Act before the House Committee on Science (Chairman Sensenbrenner); July 30, 1997
Members Present:
Chairman Sensenbrenner (R-WI), Ranking Minority Member Brown (D-CA), Morella (R-MD), Brady (R-TX), Rohrabacher (R-CA), Weldon (R-FL), Sessions (R-TX), Stabenow (D-MI), Rivers (D-MI), Cook (R-UT), Roemer (D-IN), Ehlers (R-MI), Luther (D-MN), Tauscher (D-CA), Lofgren (D-CA), and Gutknecht (R-MN)Witnesses:
Ms. Susan Kladiva, Acting Associate Director, Energy Resources and Science Issues, U.S. General Accounting Office, Washington, DCHearing Summary:Mr. Alan Ladwig, Associate Administrator for Policy and Plans, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Washington, DC
Ms. Diana H. Josephson, Deputy Undersecretary for Oceans and Atmosphere, U.S. Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Washington, DC
Dr. Joe Bordogna, Acting Deputy Director, National Science Foundation, Washington, DC
Mr. Mark Chupka, Acting Assistant Secretary for Policy and International Affairs, U.S. Department of Energy, Washington, DC
On July 30, the House Science Committee (Chairman Sensenbrenner (R-WI)) met to review the efforts of civilian science Departments and agencies in implementing the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 (GPRA). Appearing before the Committee were representatives from NASA, the General Accounting Office (GAO), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Department of Energy (DOE). Although acknowledging that the Departments and agencies appearing before him were "farther along than others," Chairman Sensenbrenner was critical of the draft strategic plans, indicating that none of the plans fully complies with the requirements of GPRA. Of particular concern to the Chairman, as well as other Members of the Committee, was a perceived failure of the various draft strategic plans to identify overlapping goals and "cross-cutting" functions between the Departments and agencies. The Chairman also stated he was disappointed with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for not being more assertive in its "important role" of guiding Departments and agencies towards compliance, and requested that the witnesses relay to OMB his intention to continue to pressure for GPRA compliance.
Questions/Issues:
Chairman Sensenbrenner -- The Chairman’s first "question" concerned what he termed a "misleading statement" appearing in Aerospace America and attributed to the NASA witnesses, Mr. Ladwig, for which the Chairman requested an apology. Mr. Ladwig responded that he would clarify his statement in a letter to the editor of the publication. Chairman Sensenbrenner then questioned both DOE and NOAA on specific deficiencies in their draft strategic plans, and requested that these be addressed before the plans become final in September.
Congressman Brown -- Following up on prior correspondence with NSF, Mr. Brown discussed how NSF could measure their accomplishments with respect to increasing the diversity of the workforce, adding that NSF was doing well in training international students, but he wanted more focus on increasing diversity within the American student population.
Congressman Brady -- Commenting that NASA’s contract management was identified as one of GAO’s top 12 high risk areas, Mr. Brady expressed concern that NASA’s draft strategic plan did not address procurement reforms. He specifically suggested that removal of contract management from GAO’s high risk list would be a suitable goal for the Agency.
Congresswoman Morella -- Ms. Morella was concerned with identifying "cross-cutting" functions and questioned GAO as to whether it was the responsibility of the agencies, OMB or both. The GAO indicated that according to OMB circular A-11, it was the Departments and agencies who were responsible for identifying the overlap, but that OMB in their role of reviewing all strategic plans should also be responsible for identifying duplication among agencies. Ms. Morella commented that similar to addressing the "year 2000" problem, this issue needs someone at a high level to "keep things on track."
Congressman Rohrabacher -- After congratulating NASA on its draft strategic plan, and commenting on Mr. Goldin’s stated priority of cheap access to space, Mr. Rohrabacher questioned why the plan did not have any detail on how the agency would reduce the cost of space transportation. Mr. Ladwig indicated that those details were contained in the Aeronautic and Space Transportation Technology Enterprise draft strategic plan. In a discussion of NASA’s long-term goal of conducting an international human mission to planets and other bodies in our solar system, both Mr. Rohrabacher and the Chairman emphasized that such a major undertaking would have to be authorized and the subject of oversight hearings before NASA should proceed in that direction.
Congressman Weldon -- Mr. Weldon asked a variety of questions about NASA’s draft plan such as: whether the Agency had received a formal response from the Senate on the plan; whether there had been international input to the plan; where the Origins program fit within the plan; and, whether this plan was more successful that prior strategic plans.
Congressman Sessions -- While referring to a chart indicating that more than 7 different Departments and agencies are currently conducting breast cancer research (NASA was not listed on the chart), Mr. Sessions expressed concern with whether there was enough coordination between agencies to identify and reduce duplicative efforts. Similar to the discussion with Ms. Morella, the GAO suggested that Departments and agencies as well as OMB should be responsible for the identification of "cross-cutting" functions.
Congresswoman Stabenow -- Ms. Stabenow expressed concern with the difficulty of evaluating annual performance results for basic research, and questioned whether GPRA could be improved in how it relates to science organizations. Both NSF and NOAA offered that GPRA did accommodate "other measurements" for basic research, but suggested that most agencies were still struggling with this issue and did not have a good answer yet.
Congresswoman Rivers -- Ms. Rivers stated that NASA needed to expand on the external factors identified in the environmental assessment. The GAO indicated that many of the other plans were also lacking sufficient detail in this area, adding that the plans should be relate the identified external factors to specific goals.
Actions:
Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee: It is my pleasure to be here this morning to discuss NASA’s strategic management activities and our method to fulfill the requirements for the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA).
The Agency’s Strategic Management System provides a capability to integrate planning, budgeting, program execution, and performance evaluation processes. This system has led to the improved alignment of our goals and programs with national policies and priorities, with available resources, and with customer requirements.
The process of developing a Strategic Management System has led to significant management improvements throughout the Agency and has encouraged employees to experiment with new ways of doing business. NASA believes we will be in full compliance with requirements articulated by GPRA, as well as with Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Circular A-11 when we submit our Strategic Plan with our fiscal year 1999 budget request.
NASA has received highly favorable reviews of our planning efforts to date. We appreciate this recognition and are confident that additional efficiencies and improvements will be identified as we complete a full cycle of the system and gain experience in meeting GPRA requirements. It is our intention to continue discussions with the Congress, the General Accounting Office (GAO), OMB, and other Executive Branch offices to ensure that our planning documents become increasingly effective as management tools.
Much of the success we have realized from this new system can be attributed to extensive buy-in and direct participation of senior officials, supervisors, and employees. The Administrator assigned responsibility to develop the NASA Strategic Plan to our Senior Management Council comprised of officials-in-charge of Headquarters offices and the Directors of our ten field centers. Their efforts were supported at the staff level by a Strategic Management Working Group, as well as participation of employees, customers, and stakeholders.
Our Strategic Plan defines NASA’s vision, mission, and goals for a balanced aeronautics and space program. It also describes the key assumptions on which the Plan is based, and provides strategies that we intend to implement to achieve the goals we have proposed to accomplish over the next 25 years. The Strategic Plan is based on a framework of four customer-focused Strategic Enterprises: Mission to Planet Earth; Space Science; Human Exploration and Development of Space; and Aeronautics and Space Transportation Technology. The Plan also includes four Crosscutting Processes: Generate Knowledge, Provide Aerospace Products and Capabilities, Communicate Knowledge, and Manage Strategically.
Although we believe we have made significant progress in developing the Strategic Management System, we are now at the stage where organizations often fail to achieve the full benefits of the planning process. This phase deals with implementation of the Plan. During the next planning cycle, we intend to focus on several methods to ensure that positive progress is maintained in implementing actions to achieve our goals.
First, as you have heard from NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin in his appearance before this Committee, we will “do what we say we are going to do,” and deliver on our commitments that are outlined in the Plan. This will be accomplished through the completion of individual Strategic Plans for each of the four Enterprises that provide the next level of detail from the Agency Strategic Plan. At the same time, the functional staff offices at Headquarters and our 10 Field Centers are developing Implementation Plans that will illustrate their specific contribution to the Agency and Enterprise goals. Program and Project Plans will then be reviewed to ensure alignment with the Center Plans. To complete the process, each employee will have an individual Performance Plan that specifies how their job supports the accomplishment of the higher level goals. Through this hierarchy of planning documents each member of the NASA Team should have a clear picture of where the Agency is heading and how they can help turn the plans into reality.
Second, we are committed to continually improving the planning process. We will maintain a dialogue with employees, customers, and stakeholders to develop ways to improve the effectiveness of the Plan and other aspects of the system as a management tool.
Third, we will concentrate on improved methods to communicate the Plan’s purpose and content to our employees, customers and stakeholders. On numerous occasions, the Administrator has made it clear that the Strategic Plan is more than an exercise to check off a requirement for GPRA. He intends to use the document and the entire Strategic Management System as a means to focus NASA’s human resources and financial investments. It is therefore critical that all members of the NASA Team have a clear understanding of the Agency’s future direction and their role in helping to achieve the goals articulated in the Plan. We do not believe it is necessary or desirable to include all aspects of the Strategic Management System in one document. Our communication effort, therefore, will provide guidance on where to locate the most appropriate level of information on each element of the process.
Fourth, we will increase our interaction with other agencies and potential non-government partners to ensure that our plans are in alignment and that roles and responsibilities on programs of mutual interest are clear and understood.
Finally, we will work with our stakeholders and customers to ensure that our performance assessment process provides the most accurate measures to evaluate our success in meeting policy and customer requirements, and mission goals.
Development of NASA’s Vision, Mission, and Goals
Our efforts to reinvent NASA preceded the approval of the GPRA and the initiation of the Administration’s National Performance Review (NPR). With the growing public demands for a balanced budget and a more efficient Government, NASA senior management made an early commitment to change the way we do business. It also was apparent that the budget projections that were guiding planning activities were largely inaccurate. Whereas just a few years earlier there had been predictions that the Agency’s budget might approach $30 billion by the year 2000, it became clear that such funding levels were unrealistic.
The end of the Cold War and the new budget environment presented NASA with an opportunity to reexamine its mission, relevancy, and value to the Nation. The Administration’s NPR review helped bring these issues into focus by requiring NASA to measure what it does and why it is important. The NPR also served as a catalyst to develop new ways of doing business, reduce infrastructure, eliminate duplication, and implement programs through a “faster, better, cheaper” approach.
NASA was established by the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, the foundation for our mission. The Act directs NASA to conduct space activities devoted to peaceful purposes for the benefit of all humankind. We are to preserve the leadership of the United States in aeronautics, space science and technology; expand knowledge of the Earth and space; conduct human activities in space; encourage the fullest commercial use of space; cooperate with other nations; and communicate the results of our efforts widely. These mandates, established almost four decades ago, remain the basic tenets for NASA’s existence today and are the foundation for our vision and mission as presented in the Strategic Plan.
The NASA vision proclaims that we are “an investment in America’s future. As explorers, pioneers, and innovators, we boldly expand frontiers in air and space to inspire and serve America and to benefit the quality of life on Earth.” To achieve this vision, we have developed the following three missions:
NASA’s near-, mid-, and long-range goals to support the three mission areas are defined in an Agency Roadmap, while more detailed objectives are displayed in Roadmaps for each of the Strategic Enterprises.
Coordination with other Agencies
NASA’s Strategic Plan identifies several research and development initiatives which are being accomplished through cooperation with other Federal agencies, as well as other non-governmental organizations. For example, the Plan addresses collaborative activities with the Department of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration, industry, and academia to increase safety and reduce the cost of air travel. The Plan also describes our work on Global Change research that is undertaken in collaboration with other agencies, such as the Department of Energy, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
The preliminary reviews by the General Accounting Office and the Office of Management and Budget recommended that we provide more detailed information on our collaborative activities with other Federal agencies. We are working to improve this area and intend to address their concerns when the final version of the Plan is submitted in September. The experience gained in developing the Strategic Plan for the initial GPRA submittal will certainly be useful in improving interagency planning during the next cycle.
Performance and Goal Measurement
Evaluation metrics have been developed for selected Enterprise and Crosscutting Process goals and will be presented in the Performance Plan required by GPRA.
Developing appropriate metrics for the timeframes called for by GPRA has proved to be challenging to research and development agencies throughout the government. NASA has cooperated in metric evaluation discussions with other agencies in forums sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Science and Technology Council, and the Interagency Research Roundtable. Through our participation in these forums, activities underway in our internal performance planning process, and an ongoing dialogue with the NASA Advisory Council, the Administration, and Congress, we are confident that our Performance Plan will meet the requirements prescribed by GPRA.
While evaluating performance in accomplishing agency missions is well understood, measuring the outcomes for external customers has proven to be more difficult within the GPRA timeframes. The discoveries, innovations, and new knowledge resulting from federally-sponsored research and development programs often takes many years to become available for application by external customers.
In Space Science for example, the Galileo mission is providing extraordinary new insight into Jupiter, however, the mission itself was launched in 1989. The same latency effect also applies to our aeronautics programs. NASA research on advanced technologies in the 1980’s has only recently been integrated into new commercial aircraft developed by industry.
It is also difficult to predict the outcomes of basic research and development programs. For example, two of the most spectacular recent outcomes from the Hubble Space Telescope--the discovery of the formation of new stars and a Brown Dwarf in another solar system--were not explicitly planned outcomes of the Hubble program. These discoveries have, however, provided tremendous new knowledge about the universe and will add to our understanding of planetary systems.
Federal organizations also are not necessarily in direct control of the outcomes of their research and development programs. We can make cutting-edge new technologies, systems, and processes available to industry and other Government agencies; however, we cannot influence how they use them. We can make exciting new information about space and air travel, our planet’s changing environment, the Moon, the Sun, and the universe around us available to teachers and students across America. We cannot, however, prescribe how this information is used in the classroom. The same holds true for the data and information we make available to the science community and to the general public.
To meet the GPRA performance reporting requirements, NASA developed an internal pilot Performance Plan for FY 1995. This version was reviewed by the NASA Advisory Council and its subcommittees, and the Office of Management and Budget. The suggested recommendations and improvements to these metrics were incorporated into the next edition of the Plan for Fiscal Year 1996. Subsequent reviews have led to further improvements that will be illustrated in the Performance Plan to be submitted to OMB this fall.
Metrics addressed in the Performance Plan and our budget submittal include measures of spacecraft costs, development time for flight projects, and launch rates for NASA’s space science and Earth observation programs. Measures have been developed to analyze the annual increase in the application of our space science data in college text books, to record the increased access to and use of our data from the Mission to Planet Earth Enterprise, and the degree to which we are able to reduce the cost of Space Shuttle operations while maintaining superior safety standards.
For the Aeronautics and Space Transportation Technology Enterprise we will measure our ability to maintain a high level of satisfaction of our customers by ensuring that products and services are delivered on schedule and meet their requirements. The Performance Plan also addresses outcome measures and effectiveness indicators of our Crosscutting Processes for activities to generate new knowledge and communicate knowledge. We will also measure our ability to produce new technologies and have them reach the commercial marketplace.
Reliable Information Sources and Evaluation Processes
The draft NASA Strategic Plan defines the evaluation process used by the Agency to assess top-level performance of our Enterprises and Crosscutting Processes as well as our programs and projects. A Program Management Council, chaired by the Deputy Administrator, is responsible for reviewing proposals for new program starts and making recommendations to the Administrator. Additionally, the Council has established procedures to evaluate existing programs with a focus on cost, schedule, technical content, and obligations prescribed in the Program Commitment Agreement, a document signed by a program manager and the Administrator. NASA also conducts semiannual Senior Management Council meetings to assess performance against the goals and objectives in the Strategic Plan and annual Performance Plan.
These review forums provide baseline date and trend analysis required to assess the performance of the Agency and its programs and ensure that the Agency’s Strategic Plan is being implemented. As a result of our discussions with OMB and GAO, we are improving the portion of the Strategic Plan that addresses this area.
Results of NASA’s Strategic Management Systems
As a result of improvements in our program/project management system, we are conducting our research and development activities with an improved focus on cost. Since the GAO Report of 1993, we have gone from a median cost overrun on our major programs of 77 percent to an median underrun of 5 percent. In addition to the reviews by the Program Management Council, NASA’s Senior Management Council reviews performance against the goals and objectives in the Agency and Enterprise Plans, and the Performance Plan for GPRA.
Our Enterprises have identified their primary customers to establish their priority requirements. This information is being used to ensure that the Enterprises have the goals and objectives that, when achieved, will result in value-added outputs and outcomes for our customers.
An example of the progress that is being made in meeting customer needs can be seen in the results of a recent aeronautics customer survey. This survey, conducted on a triennial basis with a broad crosscut of NASA aeronautics customers, showed that the overall customer satisfaction levels for the aeronautics programs increased significantly from Fiscal Year 1992 to Fiscal Year 1995. On a scale of 1-10, 76 percent of the customers surveyed in 1992 rated aeronautics products and services at “5” or above and only 21 percent gave the aeronautics program a rating of “8” or above. Using the same survey in 1995 revealed that 86 percent of the customers rated aeronautics products and services at “5” or above and 30 percent gave the aeronautics program a rating of “8” or above.
Another result of the improved program execution aspect of NASA’s Strategic Management System is reflected in recent public opinion surveys. One such example can be seen in the findings from a research project about attitudes toward government conducted by the Council for Excellence in Government. In their final report, the Council found that 85 percent of the respondents felt that the government was very/fairly successful in promoting space exploration. This was the highest rated government program with providing for the national defense ranking second at 82 percent.
A Harris poll released on July 25, 1997, reported that public support for the space program has increased significantly since a similar survey in 1994. Continued use of the Space Shuttle for scientific research increased from 75 percent to 84 percent; conducting joint missions with Russia and other nations rose from 63 percent to 77 percent; and sending more robotic probes to explore other planets in the solar system climbed from 56 percent to 67 percent. The poll also revealed that support for an orbiting space station has increased from 53 percent to 68 percent, and support for sending humans to Mars climbed from 43 percent to 61 percent.
These surveys demonstrate that our ultimate customer, the U.S. taxpayer, sees improved results in our planning and performance.
Conclusion
For almost 40 years, NASA has provided the Nation with contributions that have advanced knowledge, improved the economy, stimulated educational achievement, and lifted our spirits. We believe our Strategic Management System will build on this tradition of excellence and provide for a growing list of exemplary achievements, and benefits to the Nation.
We believe that with incorporation of the suggestions we have received, the NASA Strategic Plan will be in compliance with the requirements of GPRA. As previously mentioned, we have had very productive discussions with OMB and GAO, and we will continue to review their comments and suggestions as we finalize the document.
Mr. Chairman, this concludes my statement. I would be happy to address any questions you or other Members of the Committee may have.
Last updated 7/31/97 by Julie Meredith