The 1995 PRA reaffirms the principles in the original act and gives significant new responsibilities to OIRA and executive branch agencies. For example, the act requires OIRA to “oversee the use of information resources to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of governmental operations to serve agency missions,” and it makes more explicit agencies’ responsibilities in developing proposed collections of information and submitting them to OIRA for review. Like the original statute, the 1995 act requires agencies to justify any collection of information from the public by establishing the need and intended use of the information, estimating the burden that the collection will impose on the respondents, and showing that the collection is the least burdensome way to gather the information. Agencies must receive OIRA approval for each information collection request before it is implemented. The PRA also assigns OIRA other responsibilities, including information dissemination, statistical policy and coordination, records management, and information technology. Congress has also given OIRA other statutory responsibilities related to regulatory management. For example: The Unfunded Mandates Reform Act (UMRA) requires OIRA to collect agencies’ written statements describing the costs and benefits of their rules and to forward those statements to the Congressional Budget Office. UMRA also required OIRA to establish pilot projects in at least two agencies to test regulatory approaches that reduce the burden on small governments and to submit annual reports to Congress detailing agencies’ compliance with the act. The Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act of 1996 (SBREFA) requires OIRA to designate certain rules as “major” and therefore subject to a 60 day congressional review period. SBREFA also amended the Regulatory Flexibility Act and required OIRA to serve on advocacy review panels involving rules that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) intend to propose that the agencies believe will have a significant economic effect on a substantial number of small entities. Section 645(a) of the 1997 Treasury, Postal Services, and General Government Appropriations Act, required OIRA to submit to Congress by September 30, 1997, a report providing estimates of, among other things, the total annual costs and benefits of federal regulatory programs. In the equivalent appropriations act for fiscal year 1998, Congress repeated the requirement for another such report by September 30, 1998. OMB as a whole also has statutory responsibilities that are related to OIRA’s roles in the PRA. For example, under the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 (the Results Act), OMB is charged with overseeing and guiding agencies’ strategic and annual performance planning and reporting, and it is responsible for preparing an annual governmentwide performance plan that presents a single cohesive picture of federal performance goals. The Results Act also calls for OMB to review agencies’ performance in view of the results the agencies are achieving with the resources they are given. The governmentwide performance plan that the Results Act requires OMB to prepare should, in part, reflect the governmentwide IRM strategic plan that the PRA requires OIRA to prepare. Similarly, OIRA’s reviews of agencies’ IRM activities under the PRA are logically related to OMB’s reviews of agencies’ performance and resource use under the Results Act. Also, like other federal agencies, the Results Act requires OMB to prepare its own strategic and annual performance plans and, beginning no later than March 31, 2000, to report to Congress annually on its progress toward achieving the goals in its annual performance plan for the previous fiscal year. Agencies’ performance plans are to establish connections between their long-term strategic plans and the day-to-day activities of managers and staff. The annual program performance reports are to discuss the extent to which agencies are meeting annual performance goals and the actions needed to achieve or modify those goals that have not been met.Congress can use these plans and reports to determine how agencies are carrying out their statutory missions. The Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996, which amended parts of the PRA, also gave OIRA significant leadership responsibilities in supporting agencies’ efforts to improve their information technology management practices. Shortly after the passage of the act, we reported that OMB faced a number of challenges in this area, one of which was to develop recommendations for the president’s budget that reflect an agency’s actual track record in delivering mission performance for information technology funds expended. We specifically recommended that OMB, among other things, clearly show what improvements in mission performance have been achieved for information technology investments. In addition to these statutory responsibilities, two executive orders have made OIRA responsible for providing overall leadership of other executive branch regulatory activities and for reviewing executive departments’ and agencies’ proposed and final regulations before they are published in the Federal Register. Executive Order 12291, issued in 1981 shortly after the original PRA was enacted, gave OMB the authority to review all new regulations issued by executive departments and agencies (other than independent regulatory agencies) for consistency with administration policies. In 1993, that order was revoked and replaced by Executive Order 12866, but the new order reaffirmed OMB’s responsibilities for regulatory review and leadership. The order specifically stated that OIRA is the repository of expertise concerning regulatory issues, including matters that affect more than one agency. In calendar years 1995 through 1997, OIRA staff members reviewed approximately 500 significant proposed and final rules each year from executive departments and agencies pursuant to Executive Order 12866. The order also gives OIRA other responsibilities, including convening a regulatory working group comprising representatives of major regulatory agencies. With both statutory and executive order responsibilities, OIRA plays a dual role in the management of federal regulatory, paperwork, and information policies. It must carry out the responsibilities that Congress has given it through legislation while, at the same time, serving as an advisor to and implementor of presidential policy initiatives. OMB as a whole must similarly balance its statutory responsibilities and its responsibilities as a staff office to the president. We have issued a number of reports on the PRA since it was first enacted in 1980, several of which have focused on OIRA’s responsibilities. For example, in 1983 we concluded that OIRA had made only limited progress in several IRM-related areas of the act and that the primary reason was the decision to assign OIRA primary responsibility for the administration’s regulatory reform program without additional resources. In that report, we recommended that the OMB Director identify in the agency’s budget program and financing schedule the resources needed to implement the PRA and assess the feasibility of assigning existing resources to address the act’s requirements. We also suggested that Congress consider requiring OMB to (1) identify the resources it needed to implement the act and report annually on those expenditures, (2) provide a separate appropriation for the PRA’s implementation, or (3) provide a separate PRA appropriation and prohibit OIRA from performing any duties other than those required in the act. In 1989, we reported that OIRA had established a formal process to review the 3,000 to 4,000 information collection requests it received each year, but those policies were not being consistently applied. We also noted that OIRA almost always approved requests from agencies with established review procedures, and we recommended that OIRA delegate primary review responsibility to senior officials in those agencies. More recently, in both 1996 and 1997, we testified on the implementation of selected features of the 1995 PRA. In both of our statements, we noted that the governmentwide burden-reduction goals contemplated in the PRA were unlikely to be met and that agencies often cited statutory constraints as the primary reason. For example, Internal Revenue Service (IRS) officials said that they would not be able to reduce their fiscal year 1995 paperwork totals by more than about 2 percent by the end of fiscal year 1998 unless major changes are made to the tax code. Because IRS has accounted for at least 75 percent of the government’s estimated burden-hour total in each year since 1989, we said it appeared unlikely that the federal government as a whole would meet the 25 percent burden-reduction goal contemplated in the act. As we noted in our June 1997 testimony, it is important to remember that some federal paperwork is necessary and can serve a useful purpose. Information collection is one method by which agencies carry out their missions. For example, IRS needs to collect information from taxpayers and their employers to know the amount of taxes owed. EPA and OSHA must collect information to know whether the intent of such statutes as the Clean Air Act and the Occupational Safety and Health Act are being achieved. The Results Act may require agencies to collect information that they had not previously collected in order to demonstrate their effectiveness. However, the Results Act may also help agencies eliminate certain paperwork requirements and keep the amount of paperwork as low as possible by focusing agencies’ information collection actions on only those collections needed to accomplish their missions. The objectives of our review were to assess how OIRA has implemented three of its information collection responsibilities under the PRA: We looked at how OIRA reviews and controls paperwork, including (1) reviewing and approving agencies’ information collection requests; (2) establishing and overseeing guidance for estimating information collection burden; (3) setting annual governmentwide goals for the reduction of that burden by at least 10 percent in fiscal years 1996 and 1997, 5 percent during the next 4 fiscal years, and setting annual agency goals that reduce paperwork to the “maximum practicable opportunity”; and (4) conducting pilot projects to test alternative policies and procedures to minimize information collection burden. We examined OIRA’s development and oversight of federal IRM policies, including developing and maintaining a governmentwide IRM plan and periodically reviewing selected agency IRM activities to determine their ability to improve agencies’ performance and accomplish agencies’ missions. We looked at whether OIRA is keeping Congress and congressional committees fully and currently informed about major activities under the act.