Whether or not this element is addressed proved to be a key distinction between the better draft plans and the poorer efforts. For example, the Education and SSA plans included numerous specific performance indicators tied to their strategic goals. Many agencies identified key external factors that could affect their accomplishments, but few explained how they proposed to mitigate the effects of these factors. Program evaluations was the most neglected of all the statutory elements. Fourteen of the agency plans did not address this element at all.
Duplication is pervasive throughout the federal government.
It is essential for each agency to develop its goals, strategies, and performance measures so as to treat crosscutting functions in a consistent, coordinated, and complementary way that avoids unnecessary duplication or even conflict. Coordination of crosscutting functions lies at the heart of what the Results Act is intended to achieve. Like programs and functions should be subject to like goals, strategies, and measures both to maximize their effectiveness and to permit comparisons. F or the most part, however, coordination between agencies, or even within components of the same agency, is either ignored completely or given only lip service. At worst, the plans demonstrate inconsistencies in such functions.