Why It Matters
The federal government has spent decades struggling to coordinate across agencies on shared problems. A GAO report published June 23 documents persistent failures in how Washington manages crosscutting challenges like food safety, cybersecurity, and public health emergencies. When agencies work in silos, the results are duplicated efforts, gaps in coverage, and slower crisis response.
The report, titled "Government Performance Management: Insights from Subject-Matter Specialists on Addressing Crosscutting Performance Challenges," draws on GAO's long-running finding that the federal government does not sufficiently coordinate or integrate crosscutting activities to improve performance or address crosscutting management weaknesses. Cross-Agency Priority (CAP) goals, the primary tool Congress and OMB created to fix this, have produced some results but face persistent implementation problems that participants from three presidential administrations described as unresolved.
GAO held discussions with three groups: former OMB political appointees and staff, former CAP goal leaders, and subject-matter specialists in performance management from outside government. All three groups said CAP goal implementation could be strengthened.
Broader Context
This report exists because Congress built a requirement into law. The GPRA Modernization Act of 2010 (GPRAMA) updated the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 to create a more integrated, crosscutting performance planning and reporting framework. GPRAMA requires OMB to work with federal agencies to establish CAP goals and includes a provision requiring GAO to periodically assess the act's implementation, including the CAP goals. This report is a product of that statutory mandate, not a response to a specific congressional committee request.
GAO's broader work reinforces the urgency. Improving food safety oversight and ensuring cybersecurity are both designated as GAO high-risk areas, meaning they represent long-standing vulnerabilities in federal management that have not been resolved.
The Bottom Line
CAP goals give the federal government a structure for tackling problems that cross agency lines, but structure alone has not been enough. Inconsistent progress measurement, uneven leadership commitment, and inadequate resources have limited results across multiple administrations. Discussion participants identified five approaches to strengthen implementation: involving leadership and career staff, identifying responsibilities and resources, developing tools to assess progress, planning for transitions, and strengthening oversight. They also floated the idea of a national performance council focused on mission delivery as a structural fix. GAO issued no formal recommendations. Whether OMB and Congress act on these insights, or whether this report joins a long line of unimplemented GAO findings on the same problem, remains to be seen.
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