The Coast Guard has responsibilities divided into 11 programs that fall under two broad missions—homeland security and non-homeland security—which are recognized in the Homeland Security Act. To accomplish its wide range of responsibilities, the Coast Guard is organized into two major commands that are responsible for overall mission execution—one in the Pacific area and the other in the Atlantic area. These commands are divided into nine districts, which in turn are organized into 35 sectors that unify command and control of field units and resources, such as multimission stations and patrol boats. In fiscal year 2005, the Coast Guard had over 46,000 full-time positions—about 39,000 military and 7,000 civilians. In addition, the agency had about 8,100 reservists who support the national military strategy or provide additional operational support and surge capacity during times of emergency, such as natural disasters. Furthermore, the Coast Guard also had about 31,000 volunteer auxiliary personnel help with a wide array of activities, ranging from search and rescue to boating safety education. For each of its six non-homeland security programs, the Coast Guard has developed a primary performance measure to communicate agency performance and provide information for the budgeting process to Congress, other policymakers, and taxpayers. The Coast Guard has also developed 39 secondary measures that it uses to manage these six programs. The Coast Guard selected and developed the six primary measures based on a number of criteria, including GPRA, DHS, and OMB guidance as well as legislative, department, and agency priorities. When viewed as a suite of measures, the primary and secondary measures combined are intended to provide Coast Guard officials with a more comprehensive view of program performance than just the program’s primary measure. Some of these secondary measures are closely related to the primary measures; for example, a secondary measure for the marine environmental protection program, “annual number of oil spills greater than 100 gallons and chemical discharges per 100 million tons shipped,” is closely related to the program’s primary measure, “5-year average annual number of oil spills greater than 100 gallons and chemical discharges per 100 million tons shipped.” However, other secondary measures reflect activities and priorities that are not reflected in the primary performance measures. For example, a secondary measure in the search and rescue program, “percent of property saved,” reflects activities not captured in the program’s primary measure, “percent of mariners in imminent danger who are rescued.” In 2004, we compared trends in performance results, as reported by the Coast Guard’s primary performance measures, with the agency’s use of resources and found that the relationship between results achieved and resources used was not always what might be expected—that is, resources expended and performance results achieved did not have consistent direction of movement and sometimes bore an opposite relationship. We reported that disconnects between resources expended and performance results achieved have important implications for resource management and accountability, especially given the Coast Guard’s limited ability to explain them. In particular, these disconnects prompted a question as to why, despite substantial changes in a number of programs’ resource hours used over the period we examined, the corresponding performance results for these programs were not necessarily affected in a similar manner—that is, they did not rise or fall along with changes in resources. At that time, the Coast Guard could not say with any assurance why this occurred. For example, while resource hours for the search and rescue program dropped by 22 percent in fiscal year 2003 when compared to the program’s pre- September 11, 2001 baseline, the performance results for the program remained stable for the same period. These results suggest that performance was likely affected by factors other than resource hours. One set of factors cited by the Coast Guard as helping to keep performance steady despite resource decreases involved strategies such as the use of new technology, better operational tactics, improved intelligence, and stronger partnering efforts. Coast Guard officials also pointed to another set of factors, largely beyond the agency’s control (such as severe weather conditions), to explain performance results that did not improve despite resource increases. At the time of our 2004 report, the Coast Guard did not have a systematic approach to effectively link resources to results. However, the Coast Guard had begun some initiatives to better track resource usage and manage program results, but many of these initiatives were still in early stages of development and some did not have a time frame for completion. Like other federal agencies, DHS is subject to the performance-reporting requirements of GPRA. GPRA requires agencies to publish a performance report that includes performance measures and results. These reports are intended to provide important information to agency managers, policymakers, and the public on what each agency accomplished with the resources it was given. The three key annual publications that DHS and the Coast Guard use to report the Coast Guard’s non-homeland security primary performance measures are the DHS Performance and Accountability Report, the DHS fiscal year budget request, and the Coast Guard’s fiscal year Budget-in-Brief. The DHS Performance and Accountability Report provides financial and performance information to the President, Congress and the public for assessing the effectiveness of the department’s mission performance and stewardship of resources. The DHS annual budget request to Congress identifies the resources needed for meeting the department’s missions. The Coast Guard’s annual Budget- in-Brief reports performance information to assess the effectiveness of the agency’s performance as well as a summary of the agency’s most recent budget request. These documents report the primary performance measures for each of the Coast Guard’s non-homeland security programs, as well as descriptions of the measures and explanations of performance results. While these documents report performance results from some secondary measures, DHS and the Coast Guard do not report most of the Coast Guard’s secondary measures in these documents. GPRA also requires agencies to establish goals and targets to define the level of performance to be achieved by a program and express such goals in an objective, quantifiable, and measurable form. In passing GPRA, Congress emphasized that the usefulness of agency performance information depends to a large degree on the reliability of performance data. To be useful in reporting to Congress on the fulfillment of GPRA requirements and in improving program results, the data must be reliable—that is, they must be seen by potential users to be of sufficient quality to be trustworthy. While no data are perfect, agencies need to have sufficiently reliable performance data to provide transparency of government operations so that Congress, program managers, and other decision makers can use the information. In establishing a system to set goals for federal program performance and to measure results, GPRA requires that agencies describe the means to be used to validate and verify measured values to improve congressional decision making by providing objective, complete, accurate and consistent information on achieving statutory objectives, and on the relative effectiveness and efficiency of federal programs and spending. In addition, to improve the quality of agency performance management information, the Reports Consolidation Act of 2000 requires an assessment of the reliability of performance data used in the agency’s program performance report. OMB’s Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) is designed to strengthen and reinforce performance measurement under GPRA by encouraging careful development of outcome-oriented performance measures. Between 2002 and 2005, OMB reviewed each of the Coast Guard’s six non- homeland security programs. OMB found that four programs—ice operations, living marine resources, marine environmental protection, and marine safety—were performing adequately or better, and two programs— aids to navigation and search and rescue—did not demonstrate results. OMB recommended that for the aids to navigation program, the Coast Guard develop and implement a better primary performance measure that allows program managers to understand how their actions produce results. Specifically, OMB recommended using an outcome-based measure, the number of collisions, allisions, and groundings, as a measure for the program, instead of the measure that was being used—aid availability. For the search and rescue program, OMB recommended that the Coast Guard develop achievable long-term goals for the program. Since these reviews, the Coast Guard has implemented a new primary performance measure for the aids to navigation program, “5-year average annual number of distinct collisions, allisions, and groundings,” and developed new long-term goals for the search and rescue program’s primary performance measure, that is rescuing between 85 and 88 percent of mariners in imminent danger each year from fiscal year 2002 through 2010. While the six non-homeland security primary performance measures are generally sound, and the data used to calculate these measures are generally reliable, we found weaknesses with the soundness of three measures and the reliability of the data used in one measure (see table 2). All six measures cover key program activities and are objective, measurable, and quantifiable, but three are not completely clear, that is, they do not consistently provide clear and specific descriptions of the data, events, or geographic areas they include. The Coast Guard’s processes for entering and reviewing its own internal data are likely to produce reliable data. However, processes for reviewing or verifying data gathered from external sources vary from source to source, and for the marine environmental protection measure, the processes are insufficient. While the six primary performance measures are generally sound—in that the measures cover key activities of the program, and are objective, measurable, and quantifiable—three of the measures are not completely clear. The primary performance measures for the ice operations, living marine resources, and search and rescue programs do not consistently provide clear and specific descriptions of the data, events, or geographic areas they include. It is possible these weaknesses could lead to decisions or judgments based on inaccurate, incomplete, or misreported data. The three programs with primary measures that are not completely clear are as follows: Ice operations. Further clarity and consistency in reporting the geographic areas included in the ice operations primary performance measure, “domestic ice breaking—annual number of waterway closure days,” would provide users additional context to discern the full scope of the measure.