Summary

  • The Federal Agency Performance Act of 2024 requires annual strategic reviews of agencies' progress toward their goals. GAO found that OMB's August 2025 instructions addressed ten of fifteen statutory review requirements, leaving gaps in who must participate and how results are reported.
  • Of four agencies GAO selected for closer study, Homeland Security conducted a strategic review in 2025. State, Treasury and the General Services Administration did not. This four-agency sample is an audit finding, not a count of all federal agencies.
  • State published a new strategic plan in January 2026, but as of June had given GAO no time frame for resuming strategic reviews. A plan states an intention. A review tests what the institution did. The next useful receipt is a dated 2026 review with the people, evidence and decisions it brought together.

The plan gets a cover. The review needs a meeting.

In December 2025, the Office of Management and Budget issued a President's Management Agenda with eight goals and thirty objectives. It looked like the front page of a performance system. The harder page is the annual review: which programmes advanced each agency goal, which failed, what evidence changed a leader's decision, and who outside the agency could contest the story? Congress gave that review a statutory place in the Federal Agency Performance Act of 2024, as assessed by GAO. The audit found the machinery around the appointment incomplete.

GAO read OMB's August 2025 Circular A-11 guidance against fifteen statutory requirements for strategic reviews. It found ten addressed. The guidance covered the basic review process and evidence requirements. It did not carry all the rules for bringing goal leaders, senior data and evaluation officials, and relevant external people into the room. It also supplied a presidential-transition exception to annual reporting where the statute required results in agency annual performance reports. That distinction matters when a new administration would rather put the old goals in a box than explain how they performed.

OMB had taken some visible steps. The December management agenda arrived within the first year of the administration. But GAO found that when the April 2026 budget appeared, OMB had not identified which agenda goals were the formal cross-agency priority goals or published their implementation details. Performance.gov had archived the previous administration's information and posted the new agenda, with little else updated as of June. GAO asked OMB questions in December 2025 and March 2026 and had received no answers by June. OMB offered no comments on the report. A goal can be announced before the mechanism for judging it is ready.

Four agencies, one completed 2025 review

The 43-page original audit looked closely at Homeland Security, State, Treasury and the General Services Administration. GAO selected them from thirteen agencies in its earlier strategic-review work. Homeland Security conducted a 2025 review. The other three told auditors they did not. GAO did not say that every federal agency skipped the exercise, nor that the three had done no other performance work. Each offered its own account of the substitute.

State said its restructuring and its reviews of contracts and foreign assistance supplied evidence for management decisions. Treasury worked on the next strategic plan instead, drawing input from about eighty leaders and its 2024 review. GSA officials said OMB instructed them in July 2025 to skip a review. They supplied no document recording that instruction; GAO could not verify it with OMB, and the other three agencies did not report receiving one. Those activities and explanations have different evidentiary weights. They cannot be silently filed as the annual review Congress specified.

The State Department is the sharpest contrast. It published a 2026–2030 strategic plan in January 2026. In February, its officials had not settled the scope or structure of that year's review; in June, they still had no time frame for restarting it. A new map had arrived before the institution scheduled the journey's inspection. GAO recommended that State conduct a review in 2026 and document a process that meets the new law. DHS and Treasury had older process instructions covering most requirements, but neither covered everything. State and GSA lacked current procedures addressing all the new requirements.

None of the four selected agencies had fully implemented the review rules as GAO assessed them.

The immediate fix is less glamorous than another dashboard. OMB can put the missing participants and annual reporting duty into its guidance. Each agency can name its review owner, map programmes and outside contributors to specific goals, hold the review, record the evidence and publish the result in the required annual report. GAO's seven recommendations on the official product page remained open when checked on 3 November 2026. An updated instruction is a design receipt. A dated review and a public account of decisions made from it are operating receipts.

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