The Department of State and USAID are committed to using performance management best practices to ensure the most advantageous U.S. foreign policy and development outcomes, and promote greater accountability to our primary stakeholders, the American people. At both agencies, performance management is a multi-part process: setting strategic goals and priorities; monitoring program activities; collecting data and measuring progress toward achievement of goals; using performance information to influence program and resource allocation decision-making; and communicating results to stakeholders, as illustrated in the diagram to the left.
The Department and USAID have taken a series of steps to improve the coordination of budget and performance planning and reporting in order to better align programs with management resources. For example, the two agencies developed a joint planning process in preparing the Foreign Assistance and State Operations budget requests and this year, for the first time, key performance measures are linked to these requests. The breadth and complexity of these measures preclude linking resources to each indicator individually, but the performance indicators are grouped under clearly defined strategic priority areas, which are in turn linked to budget requests.
The following Performance Highlights section presents the Department of State and USAID ratings on the President's Management Agenda scorecards, the status of programs assessed through the Office of Management and Budget's Program Assessment Rating Tool, key management challenges for both agencies, and a discussion of the public benefits of the shared USAID and Department of State strategic goals, including a representative set of performance indicators and the status of progress toward achieving them. A full discussion of these indicators is included in the organizations' 2007 Annual Performance Reports and 2009 Annual Performance Plan, found in the Congressional Budget Justification.