The Forest Service is organized into six areas, each headed by a deputy chief, who reports directly to the Chief of the Forest Service. These deputy chiefs are responsible for the National Forest System; State and Private Forestry; Research and Development; Budget and Finance; Programs, Legislation and Communications; and Business Operations, as shown in figure 1. The Forest Service is one of four federal agencies that manage public lands. The other three are the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and the Fish and Wildlife Service, within the Department of the Interior (Interior). The Natural Resources and Conservation Service (NRCS), within USDA, provides land management assistance to the owners of private lands. The Forest Service and the three agencies within Interior manage 95 percent of all federal lands, while NRCS is primarily responsible for conserving and protecting natural resources on private lands, which constitute about 75 percent of all acreage in the contiguous United States. NRCS has a budget of approximately $1 billion and 11,500 employees. BLM is responsible for administering more public lands than any other federal agency, with a budget of approximately $1.7 billion and 10,900 employees. Although somewhat smaller than the Forest Service, NRCS and BLM have important land management responsibilities. Over the past decade, Congress and the executive branch have sought to improve federal management by focusing more on results. The Congress enacted several laws to create a statutory framework for results-oriented management. The Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 (GPRA) is a key element of this statutory framework. GPRA requires agencies to develop strategic plans that have outcome-related goals and objectives. Agencies must also develop annual performance plans that establish goals for program activities and that create performance measures to assess program outcomes and to provide a basis for linking program results with established goals. The strategic plan must describe how the annual performance goals relate to the strategic plan’s goals and objectives. Finally, GPRA requires agencies to report annually on their results—that is, the extent to which their annual performance goals have been met. Figure 2 illustrates the relationship of the different components of this legislative framework. Implementation of the legislative framework is evolving. Currently, for example, improving the integration of budget and performance is a high- priority initiative in the President’s Management Agenda. The Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) is central to this initiative. This diagnostic tool is intended to provide a consistent approach to reviewing program design, planning, and goal development as well as program management and results. OMB has begun using PART to assess 20 percent of programs annually, beginning with the fiscal year 2004 President’s budget request to the Congress. GAO has documented the Forest Service’s struggles with achieving performance accountability for over a decade. (See Related GAO Products.) GAO concluded that the agency’s lack of performance accountability occurred, at least in part, because it had not developed a performance accountability system that linked its budget and organizational structures, planning processes, and resource allocations with its strategic goals, objectives, and performance measures. Adequate performance measures are key to linking components of a performance accountability system. However, as we reported, the Forest Service had not established objective and verifiable performance measures. Nor had it established specific and quantifiable objectives that link its strategic goals with its annual performance measures. We reported that the agency had difficulty establishing these linkages because the authority for these components was fragmented among three different deputy chiefs, with no method for resolving differences on how to best link these components. This lack of coordination at headquarters undermined performance accountability. Finally, we reported that the agency’s leadership had failed to credibly emphasize performance management at either the headquarters or field levels. We reported that in 1991 the Chief of the Forest Service had formed a task force to review performance accountability. The task force found that the agency had consistently promised to take corrective actions recommended by GAO and USDA’s Inspector General, but had most often failed to do so and that there was “compelling” evidence of a need for increased accountability. As a result, the task force recommended that the Forest Service (1) institutionalize accountability in managers’ performance contracts, (2) accelerate cultural change in the agency, and (3) monitor and track accountability through indicators or benchmarks. The agency’s leadership team adopted these concepts and distributed them agencywide. However, as we reported in 1997, agency leadership did not follow up with actions to implement these concepts and, as a result, the task force’s recommendations were never carried out. The Forest Service has made little progress in resolving previously identified performance accountability problems and remains years away from implementing a credible performance accountability system. Rather than developing and implementing a functioning performance accountability system like other federal land management agencies, the Forest Service, for the most part, continues to study its options, as it has for the last 11 years. The agency is developing or has implemented two systems that should be important components of a performance accountability system—a budget formulation and execution system and a work-planning system—but neither was originally designed to be part of a performance accountability system, nor has the Forest Service developed the clear linkages needed between these new systems and its strategic goal-setting and results-reporting functions. To understand how other agencies have established clear linkages among key components of a performance accountability system, the Forest Service initiated a benchmarking study of other agencies’ performance accountability systems in March 2002, including USDA’s NRCS and Interior’s BLM and National Park Service. This study reports on lessons learned for successfully developing, evaluating, and implementing a performance accountability system. In particular, a good performance accountability system, among other things, should include senior leadership commitment to performance accountability; clear delineation of organizational responsibilities for performance measurement, budget integration, performance evaluation, and reporting; close coordination of performance accountability activities; national performance measures; linkages from the strategic plan to annual performance measures to budget activities; and the ability to track total costs and tie those costs to desired outcomes. Not until July 2002 did the Chief of the Forest Service emphasize his intention to “get started” on studying how performance accountability could be implemented at the Forest Service. In September 2002, in response to the Chief’s direction, the strategic planning and budget staffs completed a draft plan for an agencywide performance accountability system that incorporated the lessons learned from their benchmarking study. The Forest Service’s Draft Performance Accountability System Implementation Plan provides a conceptual framework and time frames for developing a performance accountability system. It is designed to develop the critical links among performance accountability components: the strategic plan, annual performance plan, project planning, budget, and annual reporting of results. The plan also explains how existing Forest Service databases, such as those for formulating the budget and the annual work plans, could be used to provide the information needed for performance accountability. Although the Chief endorsed the concept of performance accountability outlined in the plan, it did not receive broad support throughout the agency. As a result, the Chief decided to further assess performance accountability options through an executive steering team, rather than adopt the system envisioned in the draft implementation plan. The executive steering team, chaired by the Deputy Chief for Programs, Legislation, and Communications, comprises nine senior executives in key agency positions. This team is to study the Forest Service’s own processes and systems and further consider options available for implementing a Forest Service performance accountability system and to report to the Chief by June 2003 on the viability of these options. However, this team was not appointed until December 2002, nearly 2½ years after we last testified on this issue and more 11 years after we first reported on it. As a result, the Forest Service has made little progress since 1991, when it first formed a task force to review performance accountability. The Forest Service began considering new budget and work-planning systems in April 2000 and August 2001, respectively, long before the Chief emphasized his intention to “get started” on performance accountability in July 2002. These new systems should be integral parts of a performance accountability system, but the Forest Service has not developed clear linkages between these new systems’ main outputs—budgets and work activities—and its strategic goals and performance results. Without these linkages, the agency will not be able to report in an integrated, results- oriented way on what activities it completed, how much they cost, and what they accomplished—key elements of any effective performance accountability system. In June 2000, the House Committee on Appropriations reported it was concerned that the agency devoted too much of its funding to headquarters initiatives and special projects, to the detriment of conservation and public service activities the Committee believed to be important. As a result, the Committee directed the Forest Service to better link its budget formulation and allocation systems to the actual work planned for the nation’s forests. The Forest Service developed such a system—the Budget Formulation and Execution System (BFES)—and in March 2001 began using it to formulate its fiscal year 2003 budget. The agency viewed BFES as an answer to the Committee’s concerns, but not necessarily part of any effort to achieve performance accountability. The Forest Service designed BFES to allow field units to have more input into the budget formulation process, to plan activities and their associated funding throughout the annual budget development process, and to serve as a basis for subsequent field unit allocations. If BFES accomplishes these goals, according to senior officials in the budget office, it could allow field units to estimate their ability to carry out program activities in light of the agency’s strategic goals, headquarters priorities, and local priorities. Furthermore, according to these officials, BFES’s potential to establish such linkages could make it integral to the agency’s recent attempt to develop a performance accountability system. However, as of May 2003—more than 3 years after the Forest Service began work on BFES and 2 years after its first use— only a portion of the agency’s budget is included in the system.