The Honorable William J. Clinton	
 President of the United States
The White House
Washington, D. C. 20500

Dear Mr. President:

Attached for your review is the Federal Communications Commission's Annual 
Performance Report for Fiscal Year 1999.

We are pleased with the results of our efforts.  We met or partially met sixty of 
our sixty-nine goals-an 87 percent success rate.   In addition to our program goals, we 
embarked on an ambitious course of action to completely revise our Strategic Plan to 
ensure that our plan reflects the goals of a converging and increasingly global 
telecommunications industry.  In redoing our plan, we reached out to industry, to state, 
regional, and local governments, to academe and consumer interest groups, and to our 
own employees to provide us with input into the plan.  In August 1999, we issued a draft 
Strategic Plan that, I believe, provides measurable, results-oriented performance goals for 
the next five years.

Another notable achievement in Fiscal Year 1999 was the completion of our plan 
to consolidate our enforcement and consumer information activities.  Historically, the 
FCC has been organized along the traditional lines of wire, wireless, satellite, broadcast 
and cable communications.  This traditional structure no longer makes sense in an era 
when the lines dividing many communications service providers are blurring.  
Consolidation of our consumer information services will allow us to provide improved 
information services to consumers facing a bewildering choice of competing 
telecommunications services.  Centralization of our enforcement activities will allow us 
to respond quickly and efficiently to questionable activities in an increasingly deregulated 
marketplace.  Moreover, our consumer information and enforcement staff will share 
information that will enable us to spot trends and areas of consumer and industry 
concern.

I would also like to note that we achieved this level of success despite some 
formidable programmatic obstacles, including:

? A multi-phased, logistically complex agency move that required that we maintain 
duplicate operations for seven months.  This move, and the need to maintain two 
separate sites, challenged our resources, particularly our information technology 
infrastructure;




? An in-depth review of all our mission critical automated processing systems to ensure 
that each system was fully Year-2000 compliant.  This effort required a months-long 
review and testing of our major systems and the identification of all smaller systems 
that required conversion before December 31, 1999. 

? In addition, we completed a Business Continuity and Contingency Plan for every             
automated system, major or minor, in case our reviews failed to identify all Y2k 
problems.  The need to complete these reviews and contingency plans resulted in our 
deferring scheduled enhancements or replacements to several major licensing and 
document management systems;

? Failure to obtain the necessary funding in Fiscal Year 1999 to upgrade our network 
infrastructure and to complete several of the performance goals specified in our Fiscal 
Year 1999 Annual Performance Plan. For example, we deferred completion of the 
implementation of two of the Mass Media Bureau's electronic filing systems and an 
agency-wide electronic document management system.  We plan to complete work on 
these systems in Fiscal Year 2000, if additional funding can be obtained. 

I look forward to hearing your comments on our Annual Performance Plan.

						Sincerely,



William E. Kennard
Chairman

Enclosure