Agency Scorecard, Department of Energy

DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY

DOE’s progress ranks it among the most improved agencies. It continues to address remaining challenges, including having people with the right skills to carry out its diverse missions, lingering weaknesses in how it plans and manages capital investments, and managing a contractor workforce of over 100,000.

Initiative	Status	Progress
Human Capital — DOE has made progress getting the expertise needed in its most critical mission areas, reducing management layers, and streamlining operations. It has established new qualifications for its project and contract management staff’ to strengthen its scrutiny of contractor performance.	•	•
Competitive Sourcing — DOE is reviewing more than 1,100 federal and 1,000 contractor positions. Its status reflects that it has not completed reviews of 10 percent of its commercial positions (994 Federal positions).	•	•
Financial Performance — DOE received a clean opinion on its financial statement in 2001. Its financial controls have no major weaknesses, but are not yet integrated with its performance management systems.	•	•
Expanding E-Government — DOE’s “yellow” status reflects its progress developing the financial analysis needed to support its information technology investments and participating in E-Government initiatives.	•	•
Budget/Performance Integration — DOE’ has not identified how it intends to address remaining problems in defining benchmarks to assess its performance and show how it intends to use its resources to achieve them.	•	•
Research and Development (R&D) Investment Criteria (Government-wide) — DOE evaluated nearly all of its R&D programs this year using the R&D Investment Criteria, putting it at the forefront of agency efforts to apply this tool to evaluate program performance. NASA and the National Science Foundation also made progress, but the government-wide status score of this initiative remains “red” until other agencies more meaningfully implement the Investment Criteria.	•	•

arrows indicate change in status since baseline evaluation on September 30, 2001.

Program Assessments

DOE’s assessments indicate that its programs are reasonably well planned and managed. DOE needs to better define its R&D goals and long- and short-term benchmarks for assessing whether it is achieving its goals – a problem common to many federal research programs.

Table of Contents