Careers
Strategic Issues
Our Work
Recent Accomplishments
Ongoing Projects
Key Contacts
Our Work
The federal government faces a range of challenges in the 21st century, including the nation’s large and growing long-term fiscal imbalances and an aging and more diverse population. Given these challenges, the federal government needs to engage in a comprehensive review, reassessment, reprioritization, and, as appropriate, re-engineering of what the federal government does, how it does business, who does its business, and how government is financed. The Strategic Issues team focuses on the federal government’s role in achieving national goals in an increasingly networked environment and its ability to deliver, and ensure accountability for, meaningful results.
To accomplish our mission, we work independently, with other GAO teams, and with a broad range of "good government" organizations to assist Congress in addressing the governance challenges of the 21st century and directly support GAO’s efforts to establish partnerships with leading innovators who also can help address these challenges. We also periodically report on areas within the federal government that we have identified as high risk because of their greater vulnerabilities to waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement, as well as areas needing broad-based transformation to address major economy, efficiency, or effectiveness challenges.
Our work focuses on
- re-examining the federal government's role in achieving evolving national objectives;
- supporting the transformation to a results-oriented, high-performing government;
- supporting congressional oversight of key management challenges and program risks to improve federal operations and ensure accountability; and
- analyzing the government’s fiscal position and strengthening approaches for addressing the current and projected fiscal gap, and analyzing federal tax policy and administration.
Recent Accomplishments
- Pinpointing specific solutions to reduce the federal "tax gap."
- Identifying opportunities for a more cost-effective Decennial Census.
- Improving grant effectiveness through improved targeting and more effective agency oversight and grant management.
- Informing congressional oversight of agencies' regulatory efforts.
- Increasing public understanding of the importance and nature of the long-term fiscal challenge.
- Identifying structural changes—including designating chief management officers—needed to improve and sustain agencies' transformation efforts.
- Increasing the scrutiny given to tax expenditures by urging that they be subjected to a "performance test."
- Identifying best practices across a full range of human capital matters, particularly the need to create a "line of sight" between individual and organizational performance.
Ongoing Projects
- Analyzing opportunities for reforming the tax system.
- Reviewing additional options for reducing the tax gap.
- Working with the Concord Coalition-sponsored Fiscal Wake-Up Tour and preparing publications to improve the public’s understanding of the long-term fiscal crisis.
- Working with others concerned about the long-term fiscal outlook and members of Congress on changes in budget presentation and process to increase transparency of and attention to long-term implications of current and proposed policies and programs.
- Developing tools to help Congress with oversight challenges in the 21st century.
- Examining federal compensation and the shift to performance-oriented and market-based pay.
- Examining implementation issues in creating a chief management officer position for federal agencies.
- Evaluating federal-private collaboration in protecting critical infrastructure in the event of a pandemic.
- Reviewing and assessing the Gulf Coast rebuilding efforts.
- Identifying grant programs across government with insufficient closeout practices.
- Developing an analytical tool for examining the fiscal challenges facing state and local governments in the longer term.
- Examining the budgeting, planning, and implementation of the 2010 Census, including the process for estimating its life-cycle cost and the accuracy of the population count.
- Identifying how federal agencies conduct retrospective evaluations of their existing regulations and the outcomes of such reviews.
- Examining various design elements of user fees in order to improve the fees’ equity, efficiency, revenue adequacy, and administrative/transition costs.
- Examining ways to improve the prompt, fair, and impartial resolution of equal employment opportunity complaints in the federal government.
- Studying how the federal government helps ensure that personnel actions are fair, inclusive, and based on merit principles.
- Continuing work on debt and cash management to assist in ensuring lowest-cost financing of U.S. government debt.
- Assessing the national plan and strategy for preparing for and responding to a pandemic influenza.
- Presenting options for improved targeting of Community Development Block Grant funds.
- Examining the role that federal executive boards could play in planning and responding to emergency events, including a pandemic.
Key Contacts
Managing Director: J. Christopher Mihm
Directors: Michael Brostek, Stanley J. Czerwinski, Denise Fantone, Robert Goldenkoff, Susan J. Irving, George H. Stalcup, Bernice Steinhardt, James R. White
Phone: (202) 512-6806
Mailing Address:
U.S. Government Accountability Office
Strategic Issues
Room 2440C
441 G Street, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20548