U.S. Office of Personnel Management - Ensuring the Federal Government has an effective civilian workforce

2007 Presidential Award for Management Excellence

Environmental Protection Agency

Overall Management Award

The mission of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is to protect human health and the environment. Since 1970, EPA has worked for a cleaner, healthier environment for the American people.  EPA's primary strategic goals and objectives are clean air and global climate change, clean and safe water, land preservation and restoration, healthy communities and environmental stewardship.  

Over the past five years, EPA greatly improved its management systems.  As of March 31, 2007, EPA achieved 'green' status scores on four of five President's Management Agenda initiatives; including Competitive Sourcing; Improved Financial Performance; E-Government; and Performance Improvement.  For its one 'yellow' status initiative, Human Capital, EPA is 'green' for progress.  Through innovative new approaches, EPA continues to convert the Agency from a “reporting” organization to a “learning and doing” organization; from a “compliance” culture to one devoted to “performance.” 

EPA developed a system for identifying its highest priority outcomes for streamlining and focusing its measurement systems, and for cascading from those long-term outcomes down to quarterly commitments and measures that can be used in the day-to-day management of the Agency.  EPA also improved its operations and results through engaging Agency managers and staff across organizational units and at various management levels in performance management activities; facilitating the collection and accessibility of performance data; and improving the presentation and the use of performance measures to inform decisions.  Each of these actions reinforced the Agency's conversion to a results-based “learning and doing” organizational culture.  For example, EPA provides web-based quarterly updates of performance to the public and has the Chief Operating Officer personally meet with each top policy official every quarter to review the results; maintains a regular public blog regarding Agency performance management improvements; and systematically identifies, diffuses, and monitors best management practices.  EPA's management activities emphasize continuous learning through participation, evaluation, information sharing, and replication.  These management actions provide EPA the tools to measure and learn from its performance. 

EPA has achieved results in each of the strategic goals.  Since the Clean Air Act was amended in 1990, EPA has issued 96 standards for 174 types of major industrial sources of air toxics and 15 categories of smaller sources.  When fully implemented, these standards together are projected to reduce annual emissions by 1.7 million tons from 1990 levels.

Within the last two years, EPA has focused on establishing new systems and integrating them with old systems to put in place an overall performance management process that allows EPA managers to use data to manage.