The Park Service is the caretaker of many of the nation’s most precious natural and cultural resources. Today, more than 100 years after the first national park was created, the national park system has grown to include 376 units, most of which were created individually through legislation or presidential proclamation. The national park system covers roughly 83 million acres of land and includes an increasingly diverse mix of sites. In fact, there are now 20 different categories of park units. The most common categories include (1) national parks, such as Grand Canyon in Arizona, (2) national historical parks, such as Independence in Pennsylvania, (3) national battlefields, such as Antietam in Maryland, (4) national historic sites, such as Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., (5) national monuments, such as the Statue of Liberty in New York, (6) national preserves, such as Yukon-Charlie Rivers in Alaska, and (7) national recreation areas, such as Lake Mead in Arizona and Nevada. Figure 1 depicts the geographic dispersion and diversity of the units in the National Park System. The Park Service also operates servicewide programs from headquarters. For example, the Associate Director for Cultural Resources, Stewardship, and Partnerships operates the Cultural Resources Preservation Program, which provides funds for archeological, ethnographic, and historical research; the preparation of management studies, object cataloging, historic structure reports, and cultural landscape reports; and other research, planning, and data collection activities. The line of authority in the Park Service runs from the director and the deputy director to seven regional office directors. The function of the regional offices is to provide oversight and support of park operations. Regional directors directly supervise the performance of park superintendents in their regions. Regional offices also run programs for the parks in their regions. For example, regional offices run the Cyclic Maintenance Program, which provides funds for regularly scheduled preventive maintenance and preservation projects in the parks. In addition to the regional offices, the Park Service operates the Denver Service Center, which provides planning, design, and construction services for major park programs and complex projects for parks and the Harpers Ferry Interpretive Design Center, which provides the planning, design, and production of interpretive media for the parks. A variety of field resource centers, such as the North Atlantic Historic Preservation Center and the Southeast Archeological Center, also provide centralized technical services to parks. Below the regional office level, parks in the same geographic area are organized into one or more groups called clusters. Each park in the cluster is represented by its superintendent. Cluster members meet periodically to set priorities for park funding requests and to provide mutual operating support. For example, a manager of a park with a short-term resource need, such as for a specific technical skill or piece of equipment, could raise this issue at a cluster meeting and obtain temporary assistance from another park in the cluster. As table 1 shows, the account structure of the Park Service’s budget is organized around functional activities, such as operations, construction, and land acquisition. As figure 2 shows, most of the Park Service’s budget is for operations. For fiscal year 1997, the Park Service obligated about $1.7 billion. Of this, about $1.2 billion covered the cost of operating the national park system—including parks, headquarters, regional offices, programs, and certain service centers. Figure 3 breaks down the nearly 69 percent of the budget that goes to operations. About 70 percent of the operating funds go directly to the parks to cover the costs of their day-to-day operations. This operating budget is the primary funding source for any park and it is generally referred to as the park’s base budget. Parks compete within their regions or at the servicewide level for another 13 percent of the operating funds, which typically pay for one-time projects, such as those involving cyclic maintenance, ethnography, preservation of natural resources, or removal of hazardous waste. There are over 25 different sources of these project funds, each with its own criteria and application process. The Park Service’s detailed budget justification presents the budget in a variety of ways. The dominant presentation is by budget account, program activity, and subprogram activity, as shown in table 1. Each budget account has its own section justifying proposed changes in funding. In addition, the operating budget includes separate sections for each major function—resource stewardship, visitor services, maintenance, and park support. The account-level sections include other presentations for requested funds, such as by object class. Finally, the budget is presented according to the specific operating, construction, or other funds being requested for individual parks and programs. These park-by-park presentations, rather than the functional, object class, or performance presentations, generally serve as the basis for allocating appropriated funds to parks and programs and for controlling spending. Park entrance and recreation fees represent another source of funds for park units. Until recently, fee revenues collected offset rather than supplemented a park’s income. Recent legislation changed this treatment. The 1996 Recreation Fee Demonstration Program enabled 100 demonstration parks to raise park entrance or recreation fees and retain 80 percent of total fees as added budget authority. The remaining 20 percent of the fees would be allocated for areas, sites, or projects selected at the discretion of the agency head. Under the Results Act, the Park Service for the first time has introduced servicewide goals to be achieved by park managers. Both the Park Service and individual parks have prepared 5-year strategic plans and annual performance plans. Budget formulation has changed slightly by requiring parks to assign a servicewide goal to each request for increased funds. Park staff we interviewed said it was too soon to tell whether the strategic planning process will influence how budgets are executed—i.e., allocated and spent—at the park level. Although the Park Service has made some progress in aligning its budget structure and processes with its strategic plan, its efforts to link its plans and budgets have been hampered by the incompatibility between its activity-oriented budget and accounting systems and its goal-orientated strategic plan. Because park managers do not have systems to track spending according to goals, either dual systems or crosswalks will be required to communicate the relationship between resources and results. At the level of the individual parks, long-range and annual planning are not new. For nearly 20 years, each unit in the park system has been required to have a general management plan to guide the preservation and use of each unit over a 10- to 15-year period. The planning process includes consultation with the public to clearly define a park’s purpose and significance, set goals and objectives, identify desired future conditions, and evaluate alternatives. Parks are also required to have a resource management plan, which defines park objectives concerning both natural and cultural resources and documents the status of the resources and outlines actions to ensure their well-being; it is the blueprint for comprehensive management of a park’s resources. A park’s general management and resource management plans are intended to identify the basic facilities, staff, interpretive materials, and equipment needed to run the park in a manner consistent with both its enabling legislation and the purposes, goals, and objectives identified during the planning process. Therefore, the plans serve as the basis for funding requests, such as for new construction, land acquisition, base operating increases, or project funds. At the park level, annual planning closely follows the budget cycle. About 18 months prior to a fiscal year, staff in each park analyze their needs and develop requests for increases to the prior fiscal year’s budget for base operations. Park officials generally justify such increases as needed to carry out new or higher levels of ongoing operations, e.g., additional staff needed to run a new visitor center or to restore operations that were previously curtailed because past budgets did not keep pace with rising costs. Parks compete against one another for limited funds through the cluster, regional, and headquarters hierarchy. During the summer prior to the start of the fiscal year, staff in each park begin to plan how expected budget authority for base operations will be allocated to various park divisions, such as resources management, maintenance, or interpretation. The final base operating budget allocated to each park is the lump sum listed for each park in the Park Service’s budget justification, plus or minus any changes that were made during the appropriations process. The Park Service imposes no additional controls on how the base funds are spent. For example, the financial plans developed by park managers showing projected spending by object classes are for informational purposes only. Park managers have flexibility to obligate and spend the funds as needed for ongoing operations. However, as we previously reported, many park budgets are dominated by the pay and benefits costs associated with permanent staff. According to many Park Service officials we spoke with, this reduces the flexibility of park managers to reallocate resources in the short term. The fee demonstration program has resulted in a new budgetary process for the 97 projects selected to participate. Under the demonstration program, park proposals to spend added fee revenues have not been subject to competition or scrutiny during the budget formulation process. Rather, parks must submit proposed spending plans for estimated fee revenues to headquarters just prior to the budget year and may only spend fee funds on projects that have been approved. As we noted in our report on the way the Park Service sets and budgets for operational priorities, previous long-range and annual planning have not identified outcome-oriented park goals, results to be achieved, or the resources necessary to achieve those results. As a result, accountability in the Park Service has lacked a focus on the outcomes of park operations. Accountability for park outcomes is especially important for an agency like the Park Service, which has traditionally set priorities and developed budgets at the park level. Under this decentralized management structure, individual park managers can make decisions about park operations that may or may not be consistent with the agency’s mission, priorities, or goals.