• Secretary's Statement
• Management Priorities, Goals in Budget, Team Goals

U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige announced a sweeping initiative to address mismanagement and abuse of federal resources occurring at the Department of Education during the past several years. According to the department’s inspector general, more than $450 million in department funds have been misused since 1998. The inspector general and the General Accounting Office have each identified several weaknesses in the department’s management systems in recent reports, and past financial abuse and mismanagement at the department have been the subject of hearings by the newly formed House Subcommittee on Select Education.

At a press conference at the Education Department, Paige committed to developing a comprehensive "Blueprint for Management Excellence" during the next three months that will address the management problems he inherited at the department. At the press conference, Paige unveiled a three-part strategy for addressing the persistent fraud and mismanagement of the past several years.

The management challenges facing this department are well known, and President Bush has made me responsible for addressing those challenges swiftly and thoroughly," Paige said. "President Bush wants this department to devote its full attention to providing all American students with access to a quality education. By putting in place a strong management team and management systems, we will be able to return the department to that critical mission."

Paige announced the formation of the "Management Improvement Team" – a strike team of 8 members of the senior staff of the Education Department who will be deployed over the next three months to work exclusively on attacking the problems and developing the blueprint. Their first task will be to address the 639 existing recommendations set forth in audits of the department – 343 of which remain unresolved.

In addition, Paige announced that the Council for Excellence in Government will select a panel of experts to advise the department and evaluate its efforts. Finally, Paige also announced that he has asked President Bush to make it a priority to appoint an assistant secretary of education for management and a chief financial officer for the department. Each of these experienced managers will fill roles that were allowed to remain vacant for 2 and 5 years respectively during the previous administration.

According to Paige, the goal of the Management Improvement Team and of the department over the next three months is to:

• Obtain a clean audit opinion from the department’s auditors
• Remove Student Financial Assistance Programs from the GAO High Risk List
• Put in place effective systems of internal controls to protect the department’s assets from waste, fraud, and abuse;
• Continue efforts to modernize student aid delivery and management, continue efforts to reduce student loan default costs and use IRS data for income verification;
• Make accountability for results the primary operating principle for all Education managers, grantees, and contractors.

This management initiative is just the first step in a process of building public confidence in the management and integrity of the Education Department," Paige said. "I look forward to sharing the results of our efforts with Congress and with the public, so that we can focus together on directing Education Department funds to education programs. Every dollar we waste on fraud or mismanagement is a dollar that could be used for teaching our children, and this department cannot and will not continue wasting those precious resources."

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