This Plan builds on the suggestions of the General Accounting Office, DOT’s Inspector General, and other stakeholders plus what we have learned within our own programs. But foremost, this Plan takes to heart the President’s charge to DOT to become more results-based by focusing more closely on the relationship between DOT missions, programs, and resources. Several broad principles have guided us in presenting our performance goals and measures:

For each strategic and organizational objective, we present the key FY 2004 performance goals that will guide our activities and by which we will judge our results. For each performance goal we provide:

• A description of the challenge we face – the reason for action
• The measures we are using to judge success, and the FY 1999-2004 targets for each
• The external factors that may present special challenges in achieving our goal
• A discussion of other agencies who share in our efforts, or whose outcome goals we contribute to
• FY 2004 activities, resources, and any significant legislation or regulations we propose
• Special management challenges (when related to the goal)

An explanation of how we verify and validate our measurements, and detailed information on the source, scope and data limitations for the performance data in this plan and report are provided in Appendix I. In that appendix, we also provide information on our plans to resolve the inadequacies that exist in our performance data.

Setting Annual Performance Targets: DOT’s targets for 2004 reflect the gains we think we can make in each goal area. There’s no exact science to calibrating “targets” to resources. The goals we’ve set reflect a combination of current funding, past funding, program initiatives, and the actions of our partners. There is also an element of “stretch” – and realism in our goals. In the end we intend to move results in the right direction.

Integrating FY 2004 Resources With Achievement of Our Goals: A fundamental strength of DOT programs is that existing capacity delivers public value in multiple goal areas. By design, a dollar spent on transportation infrastructure may also advance safety, homeland and national security, mobility, economic growth, and the mitigation of harmful environmental impacts. We again have included graphs linking budgetary resources to performance goals in each performance goal page. In this fashion, we have made the linkage of resources to performance goals more clear. Appendix II shows this information by strategic goal in summary form.

Management Challenges: The DOT Inspector General and the General Accounting Office have published reports describing a number of problems and challenges facing the Department. We take these issues seriously, and have folded our approach to meeting these challenges into our general efforts to achieve the outcomes we seek for the Nation. In general, where there is a DOT performance goal associated with a specific management challenge, we have included a discussion of the challenge on that goal page, and made it stand out visually by use of a text box, as shown in the example to the right. We also indicate where a Management Challenge relates to more than one performance goal.

DOT Contributions to Common Governmental Outcomes: DOT’s performance is aligned with its legislative mandates, but in some cases there are no “bright lines” separating DOT from other Executive Branch agencies. For instance, in DOT’s National Security Strategic goal, we make very important contributions in accordance with our mandates and appropriations, but we are hardly alone in that regard. We contribute to the national security alongside such Departments as Homeland Security, Defense, State, Justice, Commerce, and Energy. Similarly, other agencies, operating within their separate mandates and resource levels, make significant contributions to the nation’s transportation system such as the Departments of Defense and Commerce, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.