## The Honorable William J. Clinton 

President of the United States

The White House

Washington, D. C. 20500

Dear Mr. President:

Attached for your review is the Federal Communications Commission's
Annual Performance Report for Fiscal Year 1999.

We are pleased with the results of our efforts. We met or partially met
sixty of our sixty-nine goals---an 87 percent success rate. In addition
to our program goals, we embarked on an ambitious course of action to
completely revise our Strategic Plan to ensure that our plan reflects
the goals of a converging and increasingly global telecommunications
industry. In redoing our plan, we reached out to industry, to state,
regional, and local governments, to academe and consumer interest
groups, and to our own employees to provide us with input into the plan.
In August 1999, we issued a draft Strategic Plan that, I believe,
provides measurable, results-oriented performance goals for the next
five years.

Another notable achievement in Fiscal Year 1999 was the completion of
our plan to consolidate our enforcement and consumer information
activities. Historically, the FCC has been organized along the
traditional lines of wire, wireless, satellite, broadcast and cable
communications. This traditional structure no longer makes sense in an
era when the lines dividing many communications service providers are
blurring. Consolidation of our consumer information services will allow
us to provide improved information services to consumers facing a
bewildering choice of competing telecommunications services.
Centralization of our enforcement activities will allow us to respond
quickly and efficiently to questionable activities in an increasingly
deregulated marketplace. Moreover, our consumer information and
enforcement staff will share information that will enable us to spot
trends and areas of consumer and industry concern.

I would also like to note that we achieved this level of success despite
some formidable programmatic obstacles, including:

-   A multi-phased, logistically complex agency move that required that
    we maintain duplicate operations for seven months. This move, and
    the need to maintain two separate sites, challenged our resources,
    particularly our information technology infrastructure;

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-   An in-depth review of all our mission critical automated processing
    systems to ensure that each system was fully Year-2000 compliant.
    This effort required a months-long review and testing of our major
    systems and the identification of all smaller systems that required
    conversion before December 31, 1999.

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-   In addition, we completed a Business Continuity and Contingency Plan
    for every automated system, major or minor, in case our reviews
    failed to identify all Y2k problems. The need to complete these
    reviews and contingency plans resulted in our deferring scheduled
    enhancements or replacements to several major licensing and document
    management systems;

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-   Failure to obtain the necessary funding in Fiscal Year 1999 to
    upgrade our network infrastructure and to complete several of the
    performance goals specified in our Fiscal Year 1999 Annual
    Performance Plan. For example, we deferred completion of the
    implementation of two of the Mass Media Bureau's electronic filing
    systems and an agency-wide electronic document management system. We
    plan to complete work on these systems in Fiscal Year 2000, if
    additional funding can be obtained.

I look forward to hearing your comments on our Annual Performance Plan.

Sincerely,

> William E. Kennard
>
> Chairman

Enclosure