Statement of Olivia Golden
Administration for Children and Families
Department of Health and Human Services
Committee on Government Reform
Subcommittee on Government Management,
Information and Technology
U.S. House of Representatives
July 1, 1999

 

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee, I am Olivia Golden, Assistant Secretary for Children and Families in the Department of Health and Human Services, (HHS). Thank you for inviting me to speak with you today on the topic of performance budgeting under the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993.

Overview of ACF’s Mission and Approach

The Administration for Children and Families is the lead agency in the Department for programs serving America's children, youth, and families. Our programs are at the heart of the Federal effort to strengthen families and give all children a decent chance to succeed. Our mission is to lead the nation in improving the economic and social well-being of families, individuals, children, and communities.

ACF is responsible for almost 50 federal programs, including: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (the new welfare reform block grant), child support enforcement, Head Start, child care, and child welfare and adoption services. Other programs address the needs of Native Americans, refugees, runaway and homeless youth, victims of domestic violence, and individuals with developmental disabilities. Our partners in helping us achieve positive outcomes for these vulnerable populations are the States, territories, local and tribal governments, other federal agencies, and the private sector.

This diversity of programs, target populations, levels of government, and range of partners makes our efforts to establish performance goals and outcome measures extremely challenging.

However, when we began changing the way we measure the success of programs, we were also undertaking a major shift in the way we do business with our partners. Our changing role with States and grantees allowed us to re-examine the culture of our agency in ways that accelerated major reforms in many of our programs. In order to focus on results, we simultaneously worked on correcting our performance information, and strengthened our partnerships with States and grantees through the development of agreed-upon goals, measures and targets.

Implementation of GPRA

Let me describe our experience in developing performance measures and linking these measures to our budget and some of the lessons we have learned. We are pleased with the recognition we have received for our work, particularly our consultations and consensus-building with our partners around developing these measures, and our approach to linking performance measures to the budget.

There were several critical steps that we took early on to lay the groundwork for implementing the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA). In 1994, shortly after the enactment of GPRA, the Office of Child Support Enforcement and the Office of Refugee Resettlement became GPRA pilots. At the same time, we initiated an agency-wide process involving all of our staff in defining the vision, values and goals of the Administration for Children and Families. In 1995, we released our first report card, Achieving Success for Children and Families, based on the goals we identified. That report card included goals for our major programs, identified data sources, and provided us with initial baselines and trend data that we would later use in talking with our partners at the State and local level about identifying achievable targets.

Over the next two years, a number of senior staff members, including myself, taught more than twenty two-day partnership collaboration sessions in both our central and regional offices. The course included the basics of how to work differently and more collaboratively with our partners, how to focus on results, and how to reach consensus on common achievable targets.

In order to continue to focus on a collaborative approach to achieve common goals, a Performance Measurement work-group was established consisting of 25 staff representing both central and regional offices. Their charge was to create a culture within ACF that focused on results by providing technical assistance, sharing lessons learned across programs, and beginning the work of identifying specific performance measures in certain major programs.

This group hosted a 3-day conference in 1996, which included 100 staff from Central Office, 100 staff from the Regional Offices, and 50 of our partners at the State and local level. I am convinced that these early efforts paid off in an increased ability to collaborate with our partners in our ongoing efforts to identify realistic and achievable performance targets for ACF programs.

We have identified four common crosscutting goals for ACF, which provide the framework for building program objectives, outcome measures, and achievable targets. These goals are:

Development of Performance Measures with Partners

I would like to discuss briefly the approaches we used, and are continuing to use, in working with our partners to identify agreed-upon measures and annual targets. We have committed ourselves, wherever possible, to establishing and achieving measurable results that will make a difference in the lives of people and their communities. I am a firm believer that not one size fits all. Each of our programs has different funding mechanisms, unique legislative requirements, various types of partners, and different data collection systems. It was imperative that we create a variety of models for establishing partnership relationships and methods of consultation.

To encourage cross-organization learning, we asked our early GPRA pilots for child support and refugee assistance to present their successes and failures to our senior staff. These presentations served as a valuable learning tool. We also received excellent technical assistance from a variety of sources within the Department of Health and Human Services. We have continued to exchange best practices across programs and to embrace the principles of a learning organization.

These efforts led to the development of our first GPRA performance plan. We have continued to build on those efforts, and our current performance plan includes agreed-upon measurable outcomes for all ACF programs.

These activities occurred in a legislative environment that also has supported a focus on results, in part through enactment of statutory bonus provisions based on performance. For example, the Child Support Performance and Incentive Act of 1998 put in place a performance-based incentive system that will reward States, beginning in FY 2000, on the basis of their performance on five measures: paternity establishment, orders obtained, collection of current support, collection of past due support, and cost effectiveness.

In addition, the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) created the Adoption Incentive program, under which States will receive incentive funds tied to their success in increasing the number of children adopted from the foster care system. This new program is the first of its kind in child welfare to tie outcomes to funding and we look forward to making the first payments under this program later this summer. The ASFA also directed the Secretary of HHS to consult with governors, State legislatures, and State and local public officials responsible for administering child welfare programs in order to develop a set of outcome measures that can be used to assess the performance of States in operating child protection and child welfare programs.

The TANF statute also contains a high performance bonus provision which rewards States that are most successful in achieving the purposes of the TANF program. ACF worked extensively with representatives of the National Governors’ Association, the American Public Human Services Association, and States in developing the measures for high performance bonus awards in FY 1999 and FY 2000. We expect to publish a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking shortly and solicit public comment on the measures to be used in future years. Further, the TANF statute contains a bonus to reward the top five States with the largest decrease in their ratio of nonmarital births to total births, provided that these States also show a decrease in their abortion rate relative to 1995. Final regulations have been published following extensive consultations and the qualifying States are expected to be announced later in the fiscal year.

ACF and Performance Budgeting

In its analysis of the HHS FY 1999 Performance Plan, GAO called "useful" the way ACF’s plan displayed goals and related program activities. It also used our budget linkage approach as an example of how to consolidate program activities before relating them to performance goals in its report on "Initial Experiences under the Results Act in Linking Plans with Budgets". This approach enabled us to link budget categories and accounts to the specific activities in a variety of ways.

The ACF budget structure is a program-based account structure that allows us to assign amounts to the agency’s strategic goals based on the activities of the program line item. In budget justifications, the narrative discusses which strategic goals each budget line item supports. Where there are performance goals or measures, these are included in the narratives.

In the FY 2000 Performance Plan, presented to Congress with the FY 2000 President’s Budget, ACF created a table to link and crosswalk the goals and objectives to over 60 program activities and line items. The plan provided a narrative about program context, strategies, resources, external influences, interagency coordination, tactical approaches, and information collection issues, along with the program’s associated performance measures, goals, and targets and information on data sources, validation, and verification.

Over the past several years, ACF has experienced increasing demands resulting from newly enacted programs and changing statutory requirements, while working in an environment of decreasing staff and tight budgetary constraints. Our GPRA plan has been one key tool to help manage our resources more effectively, eliminate conflicting priorities, and focus our financial investments on our goals and priorities. Most recently, in order to assure that we link our financial investments to our critical priorities, I have challenged my leadership team to focus on the priorities within the overall GPRA plan and develop recommendations for the most efficient and effective utilization of the ACF workforce to accomplish these priority results.

Lessons Learned

I believe that we have learned many important lessons from our experiences to date:

Conclusion

ACF is firmly committed to the principles of performance management and the utility of GPRA. We believe that such a commitment must be agency and program-wide. We also believe that performance measures are most effective when developed through a collaborative process with partners leading to agreed-upon measures and that investments in data collection are an important element of success. Results measurement can produce information that will inform the budget process, especially when combined with other important sources of information, and it can motivate Federal, State, local and community partners to work together to improve results for children.

I hope that my testimony has described both the challenges and the benefits of applying the concept of performance measurement to performance budgeting and other aspects of program management.

Thank you for the opportunity to share our experiences. I will be pleased to answer any questions.