Summary: GAO assessed the Department of Agriculture's (USDA) effectiveness in managing cross-cutting issues, focusing on ways to improve USDA management of such issues as: (1) food safety; (2) agricultural biotechnology; and (3) water quality.
GAO found that: (1) USDA lacked an approach for managing cross-cutting issues and management typically relied on ad hoc groups or individual agencies to develop policies and plans; (2) the three issues had narrowly focused or insufficiently defined policies and fragmented planning and monitoring efforts; (3) USDA instituted the Secretary's Policy Coordination Council to formulate departmental policy on issues requiring coordination across two or more agriculture agencies or areas; (4) USDA implemented the President's management-by-objectives (MBO) system; (5) limited Council staff support and difficulties in defining Council, MBO, and other coordinating mechanisms' roles prevented USDA management from fully developing those initiatives into an integrated, comprehensive approach for managing multi-agency issues; (6) the lack of a comprehensive food safety policy and plan prevented the addressing of food safety concerns and duplicated efforts; (7) insufficient USDA guidance clarifying how agencies could balance researchers' and regulators' biotechnology views caused difficulties and delays in developing biotechnology research guidelines; and (8) the USDA broad water policy did not ensure agency actions.
