Viewing page 118 of 146

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

116

3.  The budget process should be adjusted to allow more advance time for the thoughtful development by the heads of bureaus and offices, with the participation of their staffs, of unit planning and goal statements.  The Assistant Secretaries and Director of Support Activities would be given opportunities to review and recommend adjustments to these statements.  It was suggested that these planning documents be kept informal and nonstatistical in order to encourage their development.

4.  It was further proposed that there should be regular analyses of the base as an essential first step to the development of future year budget projections.  The National Portrait Gallery affirmed the benefits to be gained from first learning how resources are consumed, and then redirecting those resources to more productive purposes.  These budget documents could be separately prepared from the director's statement of plans and priorities provided there were certain common denominators to tie the two efforts together for review purposes.

5.  In order to achieve an order of uniformity of presentation and the common denominators for related planning and budget documents, it was agreed that some reasonable categorization of Institutional programs would have utility for unit self-evaluation, and would help portray the full range of activities of one kind or another in any single organization.

6.  Future planning and budgeting efforts can now be enhanced by the consideration of the priority uses of anticipated surpluses of private unrestricted funds.  A number of possible applications were presented including the increase of unrestricted purpose endowment funds, payment of interest on restricted fund balances, sharing of museum shop profits, and enlarging the fluid research fund.

A schedule for planning and budgeting activity over the next year was distributed and discussed.  This schedule calls for the development of planning and goal statements by bureaus and offices in April 1974, followed by the development of budgets in May and the beginning of the review process by members of the Executive Committee.