Strengthening Congressional Oversight

A Proposal to Strengthen Congressional Oversight

Our recent Transition and High Risk series reports demonstrated the substantial costs of the federal government's most vexing and persistent management problems. The reports confirmed that many of these problems result from long-standing weaknesses requiring long-term solutions. Therefore, Congress' current examination of whether it should change its structure and operations will be most successful if done as part of a broader effort to increase the responsiveness and effectiveness of the federal government. Congress has a central role in both its legislative and oversight capacities in establishing, monitoring, and maintaining both government-wide and agency specific management reforms. Specifically, committees of jurisdiction should be encouraged to hold comprehensive oversight hearings--using a wide range of financial performance and evaluation information. We believe that a more deliberate and coordinated congressional oversight process could encourage the sustained progress necessary to address endemic government management weaknesses and foster an environment of continuous performance improvement.

Current oversight is often reactive in responding to topical programmatic issues or immediate crises. Conversely, members repeatedly express frustration that they do not know whether programs Congress funds are making a difference. This absence of reliable performance data likely contributes to what some have characterized as

"micromanagement," where Congress focuses on the process of management rather than on the results of management. Meanwhile, agency managers focus more on their budgets and adhering strictly to proscribed procedures as their measures of success, rather than achieving results.

This pattern can only be broken if agencies are required to develop and report on performance and if congressional oversight focuses on performance data.

How It Would Work

Congress should consider designating lead oversight committees in the House and in the Senate for each federal agency. This would provide a better alignment of executive branch and legislative structures and improve both program management and congressional oversight. The lead oversight committees could play a critical role in building the consensus needed throughout Congress on agencies' objectives and measures of success.

Oversight hearings--annually or at least once during each Congress--would help Congress maintain a broad and continuing perspective on each agency's performance and the status of its improvement efforts. Agencies' performance data, joined with their audited financial statements; annual CFO reports; annual internal control reports; other information, audits, and evaluations by GAO and other congressional agencies; and Inspector General

Strengthening Congressional Oversight

audits, should help ensure that Congress has a comprehensive picture of what the agency is achieving.

Setting the Agenda for Strengthened Oversight

GAO, other congressional support agencies, and the respective executive agency could meet with lead oversight committees early in each Congress to reach agreement on the broad agenda for congressional oversight, with additional topics to be added as events

warrant.

The oversight agenda would help to ensure that congressional oversight is structured to provide a comprehensive overview of the agency's performance, opportunities for improvement, and key policy and programmatic issues needing congressional attention, such as the need to adjust goals and objectives to respond to new developments. The discussions would serve as a way for the congressional support agencies to reach agreement with Congress on the major body of work that would be undertaken over the two year period. As the hearing date approaches, GAO and the other support agencies could assist Congress by synthesizing and integrating the various data, reports, and evaluations for committees.

These discussions would also assist each federal agency in making sure that it had agreement on its mission, goals and objectives, and intended measures of performance. The Government Performance and Results Act (S. 20/H.R. 826)--which Congress is expected to pass soon with strong bipartisan support--will provide an additional tool in assisting Congress and the agencies in pursuing an oversight agenda. The legislation would require federal agencies to develop strategic plans, set agreed-upon goals, and then measure progress toward them. The bill seeks to create an environment in which managers have both the incentives and the tools to focus on program results.

Benefits From Enhanced Congressional Oversight

Building consensus on agency mission, program goals and objectives, and appropriate measures to track progress.

Continuing and more systematic focus on needed long-term agency and governmentwide management improvement initiatives.

More strategic and targeted use of congressional resources and time, leading to greater congressional effectiveness.

Working Relationships with Congress

Working relationships between GAO and the Congress have generally been good and our June 10th testimony pointed out steps that we have already undertaken to improve our interactions with Congress. The relationships might be further improved, however, by reinforcing certain practices that we have found useful in focusing our efforts on Congress' most pressing needs and helping conserve GAO's limited resources.

Improved Communication on Committee Agendas and GAO Work Plans

Early in each session of Congress and periodically thereafter, GAO now encourages its senior staff to meet with Committee chairs, ranking minority members, and their senior staff to exchange information and ideas about work that GAO might do to address issues of greatest interest to the committees. This communication has been mutually beneficial to the cominittees and GAO. For example, based on continuing work in agencies, GAO staff often identify important work that is very useful to the committees. In turn, the committees make GAO aware of issues of special interest, and provide guidance on when the work should be completed to be of greatest use.

We would like to see this kind of regular communication exchange take place with more committees; and, through the committee leadership structure, such exchanges could provide important information to help ensure that GAO is addressing Congress' most pressing needs, and enable it to more efficiently plan and schedule its work. This approach may also result in more of GAO's major studies and reviews being conducted for the bipartisans leadership of the committees, thus reducing some of the concerns about GAO's work serving the interests of a particular political party.

More Frequent Consultation on Statutorily Mandated Work

In making resource allocation and job starts decisions, GAO gives high priority to work that it is specifically required to do pursuant to laws enacted by Congress. Sometimes, GAO is consulted in advance and can, therefore, influence the scope, timing, or frequency of the required work, or can suggest alternative sources of the information desired. This is not always the case, however, and the impact of some of these requirements on GAO's limited resources may not be getting the attention it deserves. To bolster our planning process and help ensure the most effective use of our resources, we would like all committees to consult with us before enacting laws that call for new audits and reviews.

Working Together When Requested Work Exceeds GAO's Capacity

Despite GAO's efforts to incorporate committee interests in its work plans, and to work with committee staffs in scheduling its work, there are times when the requests for GAO work exceed our capacity to respond in a timely manner without disrupting other important work. An increased willingness on the part of committee leadership to work with us in making the difficult choices among competing requests for GAO work, and in deciding which of their projects can best be delayed or canceled, would be helpful. This

Working Relationships with Congress

will be extremely important as GAO downsizes its staff in response to past and anticipated budget reductions.

Streamlining the Budget Process

The federal deficit is a major problem for this country. Although the intractability of the deficit cannot be blamed on the budget process, the deficit has nevertheless burdened that process. The debate is said to absorb too much time. The involvement of authorization, appropriation, and budget committees is attacked as creating too many layers. There are multiple votes--often painful--on the same or overlapping items.

Both the structure of the budget and the process should help the Congress focus its attention on the important issues and tradeoffs for both the short and long term. And it should do so in a way that imposes the least burden on the capacity of Congress to cope with the many other demands placed on it.

What are the problems with the current budget process?

1. No-one can understand either the budget presentation or the budget process. It is opaque, only understood by budget technicians. OMB has stopped producing separate publications summarizing the budget and highlighting key issues underlying budget decisions.

In a democracy the government is supposed to be accountable to the citizens. When even reasonably dedicated citizens cannot understand the budget document or the budget debate, that accountability does not exist.

2. The process is too burdensome. There are too many votes (budget resolution, reconciliation, appropriations, debt limit) that overlap.

• Every budget reform has added new layers to the process, rarely repealing or replacing pre-existing processes. Budget committees and resolutions were added in 1974 without major changes in the appropriations or authorization processes. GRH and the 1990 Budget Enforcement Act (BEA) added new procedures. The BEA discretionary appropriations caps on top of the congressional budget resolution made the latter largely superfluous as a source of substantive guidance for subsequent congressional budgetary decisions.

• Moreover, authorizing major programs on an annual basis can add to the burden. Some major programs, such as Defense and foreign aid, are authorized annually, forcing Congress to review these areas twice each year through separate authorization and appropriations processes.

3. The way we have approached deficit reduction in the last decade has largely ignored the need to make longer-term priority decisions, deferring serious rethinking about the federal role in certain policy areas or the way the federal government carries out its policies. As a result, existing programs are favored over new ones. Marginal program changes or short-term freezes are often substituted for major program changes or reform.