Budget and Performance

EIA receives funding for its activities with an annual appropriation from Congress. EIA's budget request falls under the purview of the House and Senate Appropriations Subcommittees on Energy and Water Development.

The fiscal year (FY) 2016 budget provides $122 million for EIA, a $5 million increase over EIA's funding level in FY 2015. The FY 2016 funding maintains EIA's core energy statistics, analysis, and forecasting programs, including many significant accomplishments in FY 2015, while also allowing the agency to address other critical information needs, including:

• Reporting hourly electricity data: EIA is initiating the first-ever reporting of hourly electricity demand data from the nation's balancing authorities. The data will be a significant improvement over current grid status information, which is scraped on an as-available basis from an incomplete set of publicly available sources.

• Incorporating more timely export data in weekly petroleum statistics: EIA will use near-real-time data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection to improve understanding of market trends and balances. The disposition of U.S. crude oil supply, demand, and balances is of immense market interest, with export data becoming an increasingly critical component.

• Releasing energy consumption data: EIA will release comprehensive energy consumption data from its quadrennial commercial building and manufacturing sector surveys this year, both of which serve as key benchmarks for efficiency programs.

• Extending energy by rail data: The rise of domestic crude oil production and shipment by rail has led to a parallel increase in rail shipment of other products, including propane and ethanol. EIA will develop estimates of energy shipments by rail to help public, government, and industry audiences better understand the volumes, origins, and destinations (including Canada) of these products.

• Enhancing mid-term and international energy modeling capabilities: EIA will complete its Extended Short-Term Energy Outlook (ESTEO), which will provide forecasts of medium-term oil production, consumption, and related statistics over a five-year period. EIA will also enhance its international energy modeling capabilities, incorporating deeper insights into electricity and oil demand growth in major developing economies, more robust analysis of global hydrocarbon supply, and related impacts on U.S. markets.

Read more to find EIA's detailed FY 2016 and 2017 budget requests to Congress.

Performance Measures
Recognizing the importance of maintaining a performance-based culture, EIA routinely conducts strategic planning exercises and agency-wide program reviews to establish priorities and monitor progress toward their achievement. In addition, EIA has two principal measures that it reports on annually to assess overall agency performance. These measures are included in EIA's annual Congressional budget request as well as Department reports, such as the Annual Performance Report.

• Information Quality: A consistently high customer satisfaction rating reflects EIA's ability to provide stakeholders with information that supports a productive national dialogue on a wide range of energy issues. To this end, EIA has conducted at least one comprehensive web customer satisfaction survey each year since the mid-1990s to collect a range of information from users, including customer type, frequency of website use, purpose of visit to the site, user perceptions of EIA, and an overall assessment of customer satisfaction with the quality of EIA's information. EIA's most recent survey, which was fielded on its website in September 2015, collected nearly 30,000 responses and provided a wealth of customer information. 90% of the customers who responded to the survey indicated they were satisfied or very satisfied with the quality of EIA information, meeting EIA's annual customer satisfaction target. EIA plans to conduct another web customer survey in the summer of 2016 and will also consider other targeted outreach efforts to help the agency tailor its product line to meet evolving customer needs.

• Meeting Scheduled Release Dates: Timely delivery of EIA's statistics and analyses ensures that EIA's customers have reliable access to information used in a wide range of energy-related decisions. EIA therefore tracks scheduled and actual release dates for an extensive list of web-based products that span the energy sector and represent a range of periodicity, including weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual, and multi-year release cycles. EIA has a consistent record of meeting or exceeding its 95% target for on-schedule release of these products, including a 95% rating for 2015.

For questions on the EIA Budget please contact William Hishon, (202) 586-0156; for questions on the Performance Measures please contact Preston Cooper, (202) 586-9839.

Last updated: Februry 2016