Government Strategic Plan Requirements Under GPRA

Government strategic plan requirements under the Government Performance and Results Act obligate every federal agency that submits a budget to Congress to publish a public strategic plan covering at least four fiscal years, posted on the agency’s website by the first Monday in February following the start of each presidential term, with the President and Congress notified of its availability.¹ The plan must contain a defined set of elements, be developed through consultation with Congress and outside stakeholders, and be cleared by the Office of Management and Budget before publication. The most recent cycle required plans covering fiscal years 2026 through 2030, due by February 2026.²

The Statutes That Set the Rules

Congress first imposed formal strategic planning duties through the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993. The GPRA Modernization Act of 2010 then rewrote the framework and moved its two halves into separate titles of the U.S. Code. Strategic planning sits at 5 U.S.C. § 306. The companion performance planning and reporting rules sit at 31 U.S.C. §§ 1115 and 1116.³

Section 306 places the duty on the agency head personally. That official is responsible for producing the plan, making sure it addresses every required element, posting it publicly, and notifying the President and Congress when it goes up.¹ The duty applies across the executive branch to any agency that submits a budget request.

What the Plan Must Contain

Section 306 lists nine categories of information that every compliant plan must address. They fall into a few practical groupings.

Mission, Goals, and Objectives

The plan opens with a mission statement covering the agency’s major functions and operations. It then states general goals and objectives for those functions, and the statute requires those goals to be outcome-oriented.¹ An outcome-oriented goal describes a public benefit the agency intends to produce, not the volume of activity it will perform. A food safety agency, for instance, should aim at a measurable drop in foodborne illness rather than counting inspections.

Strategies and Resources

For each general goal, the plan must describe the operational approach, including the technology, workforce skills, and financial resources the agency needs. It must also explain how the agency coordinates with other federal agencies on shared objectives and how the goals fit into broader government-wide priorities.¹ The description needs enough detail for later evaluators to judge whether the strategy actually worked.

External Risks and Program Evaluations

The plan must identify key factors external to the agency and beyond its control that could significantly affect goal achievement, such as economic conditions, technology changes, or new legislation. It must also describe the program evaluations used to establish or revise general goals and include a schedule for future evaluations.¹ This section is where the plan is expected to be candid about what could go wrong and what evidence supports the direction chosen.

Priority Goals and Consultation Description

The plan must describe how the agency’s Agency Priority Goals contribute to its broader general objectives, and it must explain how consultation with Congress and stakeholders shaped the goals and objectives ultimately adopted.⁵

The Learning Agenda and Evidence Assessment

The Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018 added two more items to the four-year cycle. As part of the strategic plan, each agency must publish a learning agenda: a list of priority questions the agency needs to answer through research, evaluation, and data analysis to improve its programs.4U.S. EPA. The Evidence Act

Alongside the learning agenda, the agency must assess its own capacity to build evidence, evaluating the quality, independence, and effectiveness of its statistics, research, and evaluation functions, and publish that assessment on the same four-year cycle.¹ The practical effect is that strategic plans must now show what evidence supports the plan, what evidence is missing, and how the agency intends to fill the gaps.

Consultation Before Publication

An agency cannot write its strategic plan behind closed doors. The statute requires consultation with the relevant congressional committees, majority and minority, from the authorizing, appropriations, and oversight sides, at least once every two years during the planning process.⁶ The finished plan must describe how those consultations shaped the goals and objectives.¹

The agency must also solicit and consider views from non-federal stakeholders, including affected industries, state and local governments, and members of the public. Internal performance data from prior years provides the baseline for what the agency can realistically commit to accomplishing.

OMB Review and the Publication Deadline

OMB runs a structured multi-month review before any plan reaches the public. For the fiscal years 2026–2030 cycle, agencies submitted initial draft components to OMB by May 2025, exchanged feedback over the summer, submitted a full draft in September, and delivered the final version for OMB clearance in December 2025.² The review is intended to align each plan with the President’s Budget and administration priorities.

The statutory deadline for publication is the first Monday in February following the start of a new presidential term. On that date, the agency head posts the plan on the agency website and notifies the President and Congress.¹ The plan covers at least four fiscal years and becomes the reference document for the agency’s subsequent budget requests and operational decisions.

Plans are not locked for the whole four years. OMB guidance permits mid-cycle adjustments driven by significant new results, completed evaluations, legislative changes, or major shifts in the operating environment, though substantial revisions require OMB review and consultation.²

How the Plan Feeds Annual Reporting and the Budget

The strategic plan is the top of a stack. Each year, the agency must publish an Annual Performance Plan translating the strategic plan’s long-term goals into specific yearly targets for each program activity, due by the first Monday in February with the agency’s budget submission.⁷ After the fiscal year closes, the agency publishes a performance report comparing actual results to those targets, covering the five preceding fiscal years, no later than 150 days after year-end.⁸

Congressional appropriators use this chain to test whether funding requests actually serve the outcomes the agency claims to pursue. Past performance data informs the next strategic plan, which shapes future budget requests, which fund the programs whose results feed the next round of reporting.

What the Statute No Longer Requires

When an agency misses a performance goal, current law still requires it to explain why, describe its plan and timeline for recovery, and state whether the goal should be revised or dropped as impractical.⁸ Until 2024, the statute also imposed an escalating series of consequences for missing goals in two or three consecutive years, including mandatory notifications to Congress and OMB recommendations for corrective action. Public Law 118–190 repealed those provisions.⁹ Agencies must still summarize their quarterly performance review findings in each annual report, but the formal escalation ladder no longer exists.

1
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 5 USC 306 – Agency Strategic Plans
2
The White House. OMB Circular A-11 Section 230 – Agency Strategic Planning
3
U.S. Government Publishing Office. GPRA Modernization Act of 2010
4
5
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 5 USC 306 – Agency Strategic Plans

The Learning Agenda and Evidence Assessment
The Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018 added two more items to the four-year cycle. As part of the strategic plan, each agency must publish a learning agenda: a list of priority questions the agency needs to answer through research, evaluation, and data analysis to improve its programs.4U.S. EPA. The Evidence Act
6
Congress.gov. GPRA Modernization Act of 2010
7
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 31 USC 1115 – Federal Government and Agency Performance Plans
8
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 31 USC 1116 – Agency Performance Reporting
9
Congress.gov. Public Law 118-190