Building Resilience: The Role of Cross Agency Priority Goals in Addressing Complex Shocks

Executive Director Note:  Earlier this year, we shared news of the Center’s new Advisory Council. We are pleased to introduce the Center’s new Advisory Council Chair, Chris Mihm, Adjunct Professor of Public Administration and International Affairs, The Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University and former Managing Director for Strategic Issues at the US Government Accountability Office. Chris will provide guidance, expertise, and strategic direction to the Council and offer informed opinions, advice, and recommendations to support decision-making processes.

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As we have experienced in recent years, pandemics, heat waves, wildfires, floods, cyberattacks, supply chain interruptions, and other crises deeply stress governments, communities, businesses, and individuals around the world. These systemic shocks may be single, catastrophic events or slow moving and enduring. A common thread is that they pose fundamental questions about how governments can anticipate, prepare for, and respond to problems that by their very nature, transcend geographic, jurisdictional, professional discipline, and organizational boundaries.

Anticipation, preparation, and response to shock events therefore cannot be the responsibility of a single sector, program, agency, or level of government. Instead, the key to success in resilience—and the root cause of many failures— lies within the capabilities of individual network participants and the strength of a network before, during, and after an upheaval. Simply put, complex problems cannot be solved in silos.

The IBM Center for The Business of Government and the IBM Institute for Business Value, in partnership with the National Academy of Public Administration (the Academy) and others launched an initiative in 2022 to help government leaders build the critical capacities needed to address and respond to shocks. The reports from the initiative and ongoing work are centered on developing a detailed and important set of actions, implementation steps, and specific examples of success that government at all levels can consider as they build capacity and resilience.    

The GPRA Modernization Act of 2010 (GPRAMA) is one tool the federal government could better employ to respond to crosscutting shocks.  GPRAMA seeks to provide a more unified and integrated perspective on federal performance and to make performance information more useful and used. 

As part of this, GPRAMA required the Office of Management and Budget to establish a set of federal priority goals covering two distinct sets of issues: 1) “outcome-oriented goals covering a limited number of crosscutting policy areas; and 2) goals for management improvements needed across the federal government,” to include selected management functions specified in the Act.  These federal priority goals, commonly referred to as Cross Agency Priority (CAP) Goals, were to be the centerpiece of the governmentwide performance plan and to create whole of government responses to crosscutting problems—where coordinated policy and implementation are needed across boundaries.

Administrations created CAP goals covering policy areas such as improving mental health outcomes for Service Members, Veterans and their families; doubling the Federal government’s consumption of energy from renewable sources; improving STEM education; and improving the transition of federal-funded research from the lab to the market. 

New leaders can build on the earlier progress by, in addition to management-related goals, establishing a robust set of policy goals to advance its major policy priorities.

Many analysts, including the Government Accountability Office (GAO) have long documented policy areas where stronger governmentwide goals and plans are needed to achieve results. To take just two illustrative examples drawn from GAO’s most recent High-Risk list in 2023: 

• Drug misuse—the use of illicit drugs and the misuse of prescription drugs—is a longstanding and tragic national public health problem.  Recent years have seen laudable progress, but much more needs to be done to reduce the needless loss of lives and well-being. For example, GAO identified significant gaps in the National Drug Control Strategy including not meeting the basic statutory requirements for the strategy and the need for agencies to align their individual program initiatives with the national strategy to avoid program gaps and wasteful duplicative efforts. 
• Food safety is likewise a major and longstanding public health issue. GAO reports that based on data from the Centers for Disease Control, “Each year, foodborne illness sickens roughly one in six Americans (48 million people). Of that number, about 128,000 are hospitalized and 3,000 die.” A major part of the problem is the fragmented and uncoordinated nature of the food safety system where 15 federal agencies are responsible for implementing at least 30 food safety laws. GAO has been recommending since January 2017—to no avail--that the federal government establish a national food safety strategy to bring together the disparate food safety oversight efforts to save lives and reduce food borne illnesses.

These are among the policy areas that could benefit from the dedicated attention that a CAP Goal designation would bring. The Academy’s Grand Challenges in Public Administration suggest additional areas. There are a number of vital policy problems where progress is suffering from a lack of clearly established whole-of-government goals with coordinated and dedicated implementation—precisely the structures the CAP Goals are intended to provide. The reported progress in achieving the current set of management-related CAP Goals, in reducing administrative burden and improving the customer experience around major life events, for example, clearly demonstrates the value of whole of government goal-setting, leadership attention, implementation, and transparency. 

A CAP Goal designation and discipline is not the panacea to the intractable and difficult shocks governments confront, but it can be a key and important part of the solution in building the governmentwide resilience and capacities needed to address the existing and unknown future shocks.