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Department Updates

ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY

Promoting the President's Management Agenda at EPA

In May 2002, Governor Whitman and I met with all of EPA's members of the Senior Executive Service to reinforce our common commitment to the President's Management Agenda. Since then the Agency's leaders have been making great progress in a number of areas.

SES Mobility Program
We found a creative way of dealing with one of our human capital issues by instituting EPA's SES Mobility program. Many of our senior executives wanted to expand their opportunities for career growth by applying their skills in new areas, and we recognized that this would also be good for the Agency. EPA needs to deal with integrated environmental issues-ones that concern more than just one of our program areas-and senior managers with experience in more than one program can contribute to more effective solutions. By rotating SES members among our major programs, we broaden their experience and bring their influence to the full range of our operations. SES Mobility assignments also enhance our individual program areas by addressing impending retirements and diversity issues.

National Environmental Information Exchange Network
EPA is actively involved in nine of the President's initiatives for E-government but we have also developed our own business case for E-government at EPA. Like other agencies, we depend on a great deal of information generated by the states to keep track of the results of the work we do together. Collecting and working with that information has been complicated and time-consuming. Working with the states, we've developed a project to improve the quality of environmental data; make data flow more efficiently between EPA, the states, and other partners; reduce reporting burden; and improve access. The National Environmental Information Exchange Network is supported by a $25 million grant program in the President's FY 2002 budget.

Competitive Sourcing
EPA's work on competitive sourcing has earned us a "green light" for progress on the last two Executive Branch Management Scorecards. Our initial approach concentrated on the most likely opportunities to meet competitive sourcing goals, and we had relatively good success. Now that those most likely candidates have been identified, however, we're adopting a more strategic approach to yield better results. We're putting together an interoffice team to work with our program and regional offices to identify similar functions, across the Agency, that could be "bundled" for competitive reviews. The team will also consult with other agencies to learn from their best practices. We think this approach can help us find real efficiencies for the Agency.

Performance Measurement
As is the case throughout the Administration, we are focused on results. Environmental improvements are the result of efforts by Federal, state, and local governments, and it is challenging to identify which part of the improvement can be attributed to EPA. Because improvements can take many years to become evident, it's also a challenge to associate one year's funding with a result that might appear several years later. EPA is working on a set of environmental indicators and a State of the Environment Report to discuss the nation's ecological and human health conditions and the quality of our air, water and land. We would be interested in learning how other agencies are measuring performance, and whether they have solved problems similar to EPA's.

Costs and Results
As we improve our ability to describe results, we're also developing better approaches to cost information. EPA's flexible account structure lets us create accounts for specific purposes, as we did when responding to anthrax contamination on Capitol Hill. We were able to associate costs with specific sites and break out payment information on different activities-and we did this on a real-time basis to produce accurate spending reports for Congressional requesters. EPA has also invested in a business intelligence product that will bring this up-to-date financial information direct to our program managers for decision-making purposes.

These are the kinds of practical initiatives EPA is working on to promote the President's Management Agenda for government reform.

Yours truly,

Linda Fisher



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