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.
|