The U.S. Geological Survey Mineral Resources Program Five-Year Plan, 2006-2010

Budget and performance integration

The section describing the five-year goals for MRP contains funding information for each goal, based on the assumption of flat funding to MRP over the life of this plan. The distribution of funds allocated reflects programmatic priorities, expected availability of staff, and estimates of investments required to achieve the identified five-year goals. The following table summarizes anticipated funds outlays for the life of this plan. It demonstrates USGS' intention to maintain emphasis on (and funding for) assessing potential for undiscovered mineral deposits, to decrease emphasis on geoenvironmental assessments, to increase emphasis on providing essential baseline data for the United States, and to maintain level funding for required scientific facilities and for long-term databases on mineral production and consumption. Annual targets for the performance measures to which MRP reports (see section above) will reflect these adjustments in funding.

This budget scenario provides no funds for increased costs associated with salary and facility cost increases. For this reason, each year at this funding level will require a decrease in productivity; these decreases will be cumulative and by 2010 will result in fewer staff and fewer products delivered.

In addition to reporting on performance, MRP uses the system developed by DOI's National Business Center to capture cost data and relate those costs to the DOI Strategic Plan (U.S. Department of the Interior, 2003). The Activity Based Cost/Management (ABC/M) system is a management tool that provides information about the cost of doing work and how work aligns with the Department's strategic objectives (U.S. Department of the Interior, 2005). ABC/M provides information on: unit cost of production of all DOI work activities, cost of executing goals and strategies in DOI's strategic plan, performance against targets, minimum efficient workload, predicting costs for changing workloads, and organizations where cost efficiency needs to be improved.

MRP-funded project work is coded to USGS-specific work activities, through which project work is tied to the Department's strategic plan. Beginning in FY 2006, codes will be assigned to individual tasks within projects, to provide more specific reporting of the types of work undertaken, their costs, and their association with MRP performance measures and DOI strategic goals. The table below demonstrates the connections between work activities (as codified in the ABC code definitions), outputs (the things that are measured in the performance measures described in the section above), and funding. The funds data shown are for FY 2005, the second year for which data are available. We expect to see significant changes in FY 2006 because of the shift to task-level coding. Coding at the project level, as was required in FY 2004 and FY 2005, makes it impossible to separate research from the mineral resource and mineral environmental assessments that are the reason for the research. Similarly with project level coding it is not possible to identify technical assistance that is provided in the course of conducting assessments to aid in specific land planning processes.

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