Interesting FBI Priorities

Recently, I waded through the fiscal year 2010 budget request/justification documents for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which for the most part are about as unexciting as you might expect. A couple of things, however, stood out as kind of interesting and worthy of discussion, so I thought I’d go over them here.

Part of the budget documents include performance metrics that the Bureau have assigned to themselves; they then annually grade themselves on how well they’re doing. I’m honestly not clear why this is the case, unless – however cynical it might be – they’re there just to make the Bureau “look good” and successful come budget-request time.

There’s nothing wrong with setting targets for performance; such a practice helps ensure focus and accountability and so on. The thing is, a lot of the FBI’s performance targets are qualitative, rather than quantitative, and I wonder if this isn’t actually detrimental under some circumstances.

For instance, the Bureau has identified certain criminal enterprises as “consolidated priority organizational targets”, or CPOTs. All fine and dandy, assuming there’s some degree of accountability where adding organizations to the list is concerned. The potential problem, as I see it, is that the Bureau then requires that a percentage of investigations by certain operational divisions involve individuals connected to a CPOT.

That’s great, on the surface, because it helps ensure that priority organizational targets remain, you know, priorities.

You have to wonder, though – given the importance of these performance metrics to the Bureau – whether (or how many) field offices skimp on other investigations so they don’t mess up their percentages and get in Washington’s bad graces.

I’m not saying it’s happening, but let’s be honest, here; that kind of target metric is incredibly prone to abuse.

Food for thought?