The Honorable William J. Clinton
President of the United States
The White House
Washington, D. C. 20500

Dear Mr. President:

Attached for your review is the Federal Communications Commission's Annual Performance Report for Fiscal Year 1999.

We are pleased with the results of our efforts. We met or partially met sixty of our sixty-nine goals-an 87 percent success rate. In addition to our program goals, we embarked on an ambitious course of action to completely revise our Strategic Plan to ensure that our plan reflects the goals of a converging and increasingly global telecommunications industry. In redoing our plan, we reached out to industry, to state, regional, and local governments, to academe and consumer interest groups, and to our own employees to provide us with input into the plan. In August 1999, we issued a draft Strategic Plan that, I believe, provides measurable, results-oriented performance goals for the next five years.

Another notable achievement in Fiscal Year 1999 was the completion of our plan to consolidate our enforcement and consumer information activities. Historically, the FCC has been organized along the traditional lines of wire, wireless, satellite, broadcast and cable communications. This traditional structure no longer makes sense in an era when the lines dividing many communications service providers are blurring. Consolidation of our consumer information services will allow us to provide improved information services to consumers facing a bewildering choice of competing telecommunications services. Centralization of our enforcement activities will allow us to respond quickly and efficiently to questionable activities in an increasingly deregulated marketplace. Moreover, our consumer information and enforcement staff will share information that will enable us to spot trends and areas of consumer and industry concern.

I would also like to note that we achieved this level of success despite some formidable programmatic obstacles, including:

• A multi-phased, logistically complex agency move that required that we maintain duplicate operations for seven months. This move, and the need to maintain two separate sites, challenged our resources, particularly our information technology infrastructure;

• An in-depth review of all our mission critical automated processing systems to ensure that each system was fully Year-2000 compliant. This effort required a months-long review and testing of our major systems and the identification of all smaller systems that required conversion before December 31, 1999.

• In addition, we completed a Business Continuity and Contingency Plan for every automated system, major or minor, in case our reviews failed to identify all Y2k problems. The need to complete these reviews and contingency plans resulted in our deferring scheduled enhancements or replacements to several major licensing and document management systems;

• Failure to obtain the necessary funding in Fiscal Year 1999 to upgrade our network infrastructure and to complete several of the performance goals specified in our Fiscal Year 1999 Annual Performance Plan. For example, we deferred completion of the implementation of two of the Mass Media Bureau's electronic filing systems and an agency-wide electronic document management system. We plan to complete work on these systems in Fiscal Year 2000, if additional funding can be obtained.

I look forward to hearing your comments on our Annual Performance Plan.

Sincerely,


William E. Kennard
Chairman

Enclosure:
Annual Performance Report: Word97 | Acrobat