USDA OIG Strategic Plan - Fiscal Years 2025-2029
Who We Are and What We Do
Our strategic plan shares our organizational priorities for the next 5 years. It provides a vision and a path forward for OIG based on extensive discussions among senior staff and across the entire organization. It helps us focus on the most critical oversight work, guides our team of over 400 employees, and sets expectations for our stakeholders and the American public. And, of course, it provides us with a dynamic roadmap to review, refine, and reassess as we adapt to changes in our environment.
We have four strategic goals that guide our office as we carry out our mission. Within those strategic goals, we identified specific objectives, along with performance goals to clearly articulate what success will look like if we achieve those objectives. We will use annual performance plans and reports to track those goals over the next 5 years.
Our mission is to promote the economy, efficiency, and integrity of USDA programs and operations through audits, investigations, inspections, data analytics, and reviews. We accomplish our mission by way of an organizational culture that values our employees and encourages innovation, trust, and positive change.
Our work advances the value, safety and security, and integrity of USDA programs and operations. We are committed to this shared vision and continually strive for excellence by empowering employees for success.
The principles of respect, integrity, collaboration, and innovation guide our decision-making.
Respect: We pledge to treat others with dignity while expecting others to do the same.
Integrity: We commit to honesty and maintaining strong moral principles that unify us as an undivided team.
Collaboration: We aspire to create a culture of multi-disciplinary partnerships to achieve greater mission and operational outcomes by working across organizational lines and leveraging a diversity of knowledge, skills, and perspectives.
Innovation: We aim to cultivate a mindset that celebrates and encourages new and creative approaches that challenge conventional notions of how things have been done before to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the organization.
Our Goals and Strategic Objectives
Our fundamental mission is to improve and protect USDA programs through our oversight work. The American people depend on the diverse offerings within USDA’s broad portfolio—food and nutrition; food safety; farm production and conservation; marketing and regulatory practices; natural resources and environment, research, and economics; rural development, trade and foreign agriculture; and many others—and it is our responsibility to help make them as successful as possible by identifying weaknesses and opportunities for improvement. Fraud, waste, and abuse in USDA programs divert critical resources and reduce their effectiveness. Through effective oversight, we identify these issues and share them with decisionmakers in USDA and Congress, and when we find criminal wrongdoing, we work with DOJ or other prosecutorial entities. By providing those decisionmakers and prosecutorial entities with our findings and recommendations, we help improve USDA programs and initiatives.
We have three objectives to help us accomplish this goal:
Strategic Objective 1.1: Prioritize work in high-risk and high-impact areas.
Strategic Objective 1.2: Deliver high quality and timely audit, inspection, investigations, and analytic products.
Strategic Objective 1.3: Leverage technology and data analytics to create and deploy advanced analytical tools utilized for potential fraud detection and performance risk assessments.
If we accomplish those objectives, OIG’s oversight will improve the Department’s delivery of its programs, operations, and initiatives.
By prioritizing work in high-risk and high-impact areas, we ensure that we use our limited resources as efficiently as possible. We conduct regular risk assessments, consider stakeholder priorities, monitor emerging threats, and determine where our work can make the biggest impact. Smart usage of technology and cutting-edge data analytics also help us design our work; conduct holistic, comprehensive reviews of programs; and proactively identify risks.
Our work must also be timely. Promptly identifying areas for improvement helps the Department respond and take immediate action. Our work must also be of the highest quality—our stakeholders count on our oversight being factual, reliable, and actionable. We ensure that our work is supported by evidence and in compliance with professional standards.
Partnerships and open dialogue are critical for our oversight mission. Timely information to and from our stakeholders helps us focus on the most impactful work, and collaborating with our peers across the oversight community gives us access to new methods and approaches for conducting audits, investigations, inspections, data analytics, and reviews. But these relationships do more than enhance our work—they are also essential to producing positive change in USDA programs. Our role as independent fact-finders requires that we communicate transparently and plainly state areas where USDA can improve. Building trust with USDA, Congress, and the public ensures that our recommendations are taken seriously, resolved quickly, and addressed thoroughly.
We have four objectives to help us accomplish this goal:
Strategic Objective 2.1: Collaborate across Federal and State oversight communities to further our mission.
Strategic Objective 2.2: Communicate and consult regularly with USDA, Congress, and other stakeholders on key areas of interest, including work plans and the status of engagements and final products.
Strategic Objective 2.3: Follow a consistent and transparent approach to the engagement process with USDA and its components.
Strategic Objective 2.4: Communicate with the public in a timely and transparent manner to maintain reputation and trust.
If we accomplish those objectives, OIG’s strong partnerships will inform decision-making in executing our mission, and stakeholders will trust and support OIG.
By collaborating across Federal and State oversight communities, we can avoid siloed work on matters with broad reach, such as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. OIG partners with our oversight colleagues to develop cross-cutting products and learn best practices and new techniques from other organizations. As our community innovates, we all improve.
To be effective, we must also communicate and consult regularly with USDA, Congress, and other stakeholders on key areas of interest, including work plans and the status of engagements and final products. These relationships inform our work. USDA has 29 agencies and nearly 100,000 employees; with just 0.4 percent of that workforce, our office cannot review every program and initiative within USDA. Thus, we must work with stakeholders to understand their needs and challenges and prioritize our oversight efforts where we can have the greatest positive impact.
Those partnerships are also essential to building trust. USDA components need to know what to expect when we engage with them on audits, investigations, inspections, data analytics, and reviews. Thus, we must be consistent, timely, and transparent across all our interactions with the Department, Congress, the public, and our other stakeholders.
Organizations need great people to deliver great work. We promote a people-first culture, supporting our oversight mission by recruiting and retaining high-performing employees. We encourage our team to make OIG a great place to work by identifying opportunities for our organization to improve, communicating openly across components, and innovating. We focus on cultivating a workplace where people freely share their expertise, bring their whole selves to work, cheer for their colleagues’ achievements, and strive for organizational success.
We have three objectives to help us accomplish this goal.
Strategic Objective 3.1: Maintain a safe and respectful workplace.
Strategic Objective 3.2: Create a culture that rewards improvement and innovation.
Strategic Objective 3.3: Utilize communications strategies to maintain transparency and strengthen internal relationships.
If we accomplish those objectives, our engaged employees will positively impact USDA’s success, and USDA OIG will be an employer of choice, not just within the OIG community, but within the Federal Government.
Being an organization where people are excited to come to work is key to success. To accomplish that goal, our leadership team aspires to build a strong, people-centric culture, which includes ensuring that our policies and procedures are designed to maintain a safe and respectful workplace. It is not just about leadership: we encourage employees across the organization to actively innovate, treat their colleagues with respect and dignity, and strive to improve our office culture. Our teams communicate—across components and hierarchies—to share new ideas and practices and strengthen internal relationships organization-wide.
By providing our team with a great environment to work, we will have engaged employees that make a positive impact on USDA’s programs and operations. And by rewarding improvement and innovation, striving to recruit and retain talented employees, and communicating openly, we empower our teams to produce high-quality oversight.
Inspectors General make recommendations to improve the economy and efficiency of the departments they oversee. But we must also look inwards to ensure that we model the best practices and standards we look for in the operations of the organizations we evaluate. Thus, our office is committed to a culture of continuous improvement. We use a robust, internal quality assurance program to help spur change, prioritize enterprise risk management, and encourage innovation across our operations. Strategic planning is a critical part of this effort, and we strive to align our people, processes, and products with our overall organizational vision.
We have six objectives to help us accomplish this goal.
Strategic Objective 4.1: Implement innovative, evidence-based approaches to make data-driven policy and operational decisions.
Strategic Objective 4.2: Encourage experimentation, foster open communication, and establish a structured risk tolerance framework to guide innovative initiatives.
Strategic Objective 4.3: Consistently utilize knowledge management tools, cross-training, and multi-functional teams across the organization.
Strategic Objective 4.4: Ensure accountability and corrective action with effective quality assurance and enterprise risk management.
Strategic Objective 4.5: Ensure internal processes are standardized and implemented consistently, follow legal requirements and best practices, and optimize OIG resources across the enterprise.
Strategic Objective 4.6: Safeguard integrity and foster continuous improvements within OIG.
If we accomplish those objectives, OIG will be an agile, efficient, data-driven organization, and will maintain credibility because it models Federal best practices and standards organization-wide.
Effective operations are essential to accomplish our mission. By implementing innovative, evidence-based approaches and making data-driven policy and operational decisions, we can conduct efficient, agile oversight. Similarly, we use knowledge management tools, cross-train our staff, and leverage multi-functional teams where appropriate to make sure that our employees are well positioned to tackle challenging, high-value mission work.
As we innovate, we do so within a thoughtful, considered framework. We rely on strong internal quality assurance and enterprise risk management processes to ensure accountability and ensure that we are pursuing the right innovations at the right time. Additionally, for our work to be trusted and valued, we must maintain high internal standards. Thus, we ensure that our internal processes are standardized and implemented consistently, follow legal requirements and best practices, and safeguard integrity within our office. We strive to continuously improve to make our oversight more timely, efficient, and impactful, and we leverage those internal processes and frameworks to make sure that, for any new change we make, we are still maintaining the highest professional standards.