Grants Management: Enhancing Performance Accountability Provisions Could Lead to Better Results
Highlights
Maximizing the extent to which grants achieve their long-term performance goals is critical to successfully addressing the challenges of the 21st century. While performance accountability mechanisms are fairly new to federal grants, they have been used in contracts for some time and lessons learned have begun to inform federal grant design. Given this, GAO was asked to examine (1) challenges to performance accountability in federal grants, (2) mechanisms being used to improve grant performance, and (3) strategies the federal government can use to encourage the use of these mechanisms. GAO performed a content analysis of relevant literature and interviewed experts. To illustrate the mechanisms and strategies found in the literature, GAO used examples from the literature and selected additional case illustrations--two federal grant programs (vocational education and child support enforcement) and two nonfederal contracts--for further study.
Recommendations
Recommendations for Executive Action
| Agency Affected | Recommendation | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Office of Management and Budget | The Director of OMB should encourage and assist federal agencies in working with the Congress to expand the effective use of performance accountability mechanisms, focusing on the practices in this report, when federal grant programs are being created or reauthorized. Further, OMB should offer opportunities for knowledge transfer among federal agencies and encourage agencies to share leading practices and lessons learned in implementing grant accountability mechanisms. Possible vehicles for the collection and dissemination of this information include good practices guides and workshops and Web sites such as results.gov, grants.gov, and expectmore.gov. |
Closed – Implemented
OMB confirmed that GAO's work on grants accountability significantly informed its approach to encouraging performance accountability in grants. In November 2007 OMB issued an Executive Order creating the Performance Improvement Council (PIC) and dedicated Performance Improvement Officers (PIO) in each agency. Among other things, the PIC and PIOs are meant to share leading practices related to performance improvement in general, as well as specifically related to grant performance. For example, PIOs are to work with implementing partners/grantees and stakeholders, including other agencies, to review and improve program performance and to benchmark progress against similar programs and explore opportunities for common measures. Building on this effort, in February 2010, OMB announced that the PIC developed several cross-agency "Problem Solving Networks." According to an OMB official, one of the new networks focuses on collecting and disseminating good practices for performance accountability in grants to state and local governments. OMB described the networks as a means to tap into existing networks, both inside and outside Government, to "find and develop smarter performance management methods and to assist others in their application" and leverage their dissemination and delivery capacity.
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