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ExpectMore.govExpectMore.gov home pageEXPECT FEDERAL PROGRAMS TO PERFORM WELL, AND BETTER EVERY YEAR.
Program Assessment

Program

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National Park Service - Cultural Resource Stewardship

This program protects and preserves historic structures, archeological sites, museum objects, and other cultural resources within the national park system. The National Park Service (NPS) directly manages these resources through a variety of means, ranging from basic inventories to full-scale restoration.

Rating

What This Rating Means

PERFORMING
Adequate

This rating describes a program that needs to set more ambitious goals, achieve better results, improve accountability or strengthen its management practices.
  • The program is reasonably well designed, although there is some ambiguity over the respective roles of the parks, regions and headquarters. In many cases, program managers at headquarters are supposed to be accountable for results, yet they have limited influence over employees in the individual parks where the work is done.
  • NPS regularly collects extensive performance information, but it has not demonstrated how it uses this information to adjust priorities, allocate funding, or improve efficiency.
  • Inventories of cultural resources are incomplete. A 2003 audit found NPS has "significant deficiencies in internal control" over supplementary stewardship information, including for cultural resources.

Improvement Plan

About Improvement Plans

We are taking the following actions to improve the performance of the program:

  • Incorporating cultural resources management goals as part of the individual performance plans for park managers.
  • Demonstrating in budget requests how performance information is used.
  • Establishing more ambitious targets to complete inventories and preparing a plan to improve internal controls over stewardship information.

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