NOAA's National Weather Service, an agency of the Commerce Department, earned straight-A grades in a government management report card issued by Government Executive magazine and George Washington University today–the highest grade ever given in the report card.

The Government Executive-GWU team conducted an in-depth review of the weather service and six other federal agencies this year. The review cited the weather service's "results oriented management system" as one of the reasons for the agency's high grades. The weather service measures success in a number of ways including by tracking tornado warning times, up nearly twice the amount of lead time since 1993; flood warning times, a two-fold increase in the amount of time since 1993; and hurricane landfall predictions, a 30 percent improvement in accuracy since 1993.

The weather service is the first of 27 agencies graded over the past three years to receive straight A's.

• The agencies were graded in five broad categories:
• Managing for Results
• Human Resources Management
• Information Management
• Financial Management
• Physical Asset Management

The story and the survey results are available at http://www.govexec.com/fpp/fpp01/mag.htm