From the U.S. Government Accountability Office, www.gao.gov

Transcript for: Improving Federal Agency Management

Description: Audio interview by GAO staff with Chris Mihm, Managing
Director, Strategic Issues

Related GAO Work: GAO-16-510: Managing For Results: Agencies Need to
Fully Identify and Report Major Management Challenges and Actions to 
Resolve them in their Agency Performance Plans	

Released: June 2016


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[ Narrator: ] Welcome to GAO's Watchdog Report, your source for news and
information from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. It's June
2016. Every year certain Executive Branch federal agencies are required
by law to identify their major management challenges and report on their
specific plans to fix them. But are they following through and
effectively identifying challenges and solutions? A team led by Chris
Mihm, managing director of GAO's Strategic Issues team, recently
reviewed these agency performance reports. GAO's Jacques Arsenault sat
down with Chris to talk about what they found.

[ Jacques Arsenault: ] Management challenges sounds like a really broad
topic. I feel like almost anything could fit in there. What are we
talking about when we say that federal agencies are reporting on
management challenges?

[ Chris Mihm: ] That's an excellent question and you're right. It could
seemingly include everything. Under the GPRA Modernization Act, agencies
are required to report on those functions or operations that are most
vulnerable to waste, fraud, abuse, mismanagement, if not addressed would
undermine mission performance. And so it's not supposed to be everything
that an agency confronts. It's just those that really leave the agency
most at risk for either wasting taxpayer dollars or not being able to
meet mission requirements.

[ Jacques Arsenault: ] Okay. That makes sense. So in terms of what
agencies are reporting out, what are some of kinds of problems that
they're raising?

[ Chris Mihm: ] Well, not surprisingly, it's a lot of the broad
categories that, you know, we often find in our work and that others
reported on as well. Acquisition management and procurement issues, both
in terms of how to manage contracts and making sure that we're getting
enough out of contractors; human capital issues; dealing with critical
skill gaps within agencies. Obviously cyber is a huge issue that
confronts agencies. Improper payments and the billions of dollars that
go out with those each year. The basic point here is that we need to
address and resolve these issues not just because they're important in
their own right but they also undermine the mission performance of the
organization. And so that's what GPRA Modernization was trying to do is
to bring management issues, not have them be a standalone issue but to
integrate or get agencies to integrate them into their thinking about
how are they delivering meaningful results for the American people.

[ Jacques Arsenault: ] So did you find any trends or patterns in the
types of issues that agencies are reporting?

[ Chris Mihm: ] Yeah. The good news on that is that, for the most part,
agencies were taking a serious effort on this. That they were looking
for major management challenges. Many of the issues on the GAO high risk
list were included in there. The management challenges that they looked
at. Many of them on their inspector's general's key list of management
challenges were included in there. There were some gaps though and we've
made specific recommendations to each of the 24 major agencies on where
they needed to make better progress.

[ Jacques Arsenault: ] So are there kind of areas that we're missing,
that GAO or the IGs have identified that the agencies aren't reporting
out themselves?

[ Chris Mihm: ] Yeah. There were a number of issues that we thought that
were missing pretty consistently across the board. Perhaps the biggest
one was on critical skills gaps in agencies is that, you know, many of
the agencies reported or did not report that they had a critical skills
gap where at the same time, the Office of Personnel Management was
reporting out that agencies indeed had critical skills gaps that were
undermining their mission performance. That's a classic example of the
importance of thinking about a management challenge in the context of
the service and program delivery. Agencies, by missing that, are being
blinded to that--weren't really understanding how that management
challenge was hampering their mission performance.

[ Jacques Arsenault: ] And so when you say critical skills gap, I'm
guessing means they don't have the right people with the right training
or expertise in these jobs that are really essential to the agency's
mission?

[ Chris Mihm: ] Absolutely. And GAO has done a lot of work on that as
well. It's everything from making sure that we have the people with the
right cyber skills which is obviously a huge issue these days, making
sure that we have people with the right foreign language skills so they
can communicate with increasingly diverse America, making sure that we
have people with the right contracting and acquisition skills so that
they can manage these complex contracts that we've been talking about.

[ Jacques Arsenault: ] Now, you also found that there are some agencies
that haven't been reporting management challenges at all. What's
happening there?

[ Chris Mihm: ] It wasn't within our scope to go in and find out were
you actually missing challenges in each individual agency. Having said
that, however, it's hard for me to believe that any agency, any
organization is so high performing that there's not a single challenge
that they confront that they don't want to take action on in order to
effectively manage. in order to better execute on their programs.

[ Jacques Arsenault: ] Your report also has some good news especially
when it comes how agencies are addressing some of these challenges
either that they've reported or that we've reported on in the past. Can
you walk me through some of the things that federal agencies are doing
right here?

[ Chris Mihm: ] We have another report that's coming out that's based on
our 2015 High Risk List that identifies specific actions that agencies
have taken in order to make progress to resolve their high risk issues.
And what we did is we took those actions and then went in and looked at
what agencies were doing and reporting as part of their major management
challenges and the progress that they were making there. Three examples
that we found were agencies were taking concerted action and making
progress. EPA, Department of Homeland Security, and NASA are all able to
report that they're making progress on resolving some long standing
management challenges by taking very specific actions of top leadership,
making sure that they have the capacity in place to address the
challenge, having an action plan in place, monitoring their performance,
and then showing sustainable progress.

[ Jacques Arsenault: ] Finally, what would you say is the bottom line of
this report?

[ Chris Mihm: ] I think the most important bottom line on this is that
while agencies have made some progress in addressing their major
management challenges, there's still much more that they can do. And
they can do that both getting better clarity in terms of setting the
goals, performance measures, being more transparent about where they are
in addressing those types of issues. Again the most important thing here
is for them to understand that management issues are not something
that's a stand-alone or off-to-the-side or responsibility to a
management shop within the organization. Resolving these issues is
absolutely key to improving the performance of the organization and
better delivering results for the American people.

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