GAO provided information on federal human resource officials' views on selected National Performance Review (NPR) human resource recommendations, focusing on: (1) whether human resource officials favor the NPR recommendations; (2) whether the officials believe they have the capacity to assume the additional responsibility envisioned by NPR; and (3) what oversight is being envisioned by the Office of Personnel and Management (OPM) and agencies to ensure accountability for merit system principles.

GAO found that: (1) although human resource officials generally favor the flexibility that decentralization would give them and their agency managers, they believe that NPR recommendations would add to their overall workload; (2) NPR has recommended that OPM develop a new oversight process to ensure compliance with the merit principles within a deregulated and flexible environment; (3) most human resource officials believe that their agencies could adequately oversee their own human resource operations, but some federal agencies do not have a performance measurement system to judge the outcomes of their operations; and (4) OPM is working with agency human resource offices to develop a set of performance indicators to assist them in monitoring their activities.