Budget and Performance

EIA receives funding for its activities with an annual appropriation from Congress. EIA's President's budget request falls under the purview of the House and Senate Appropriations Subcommittees on Energy and Water Development.

The fiscal year (FY) 2011 budget provides $95.4 million for EIA, a reduction of $15.2 million, or 14 percent, from the FY 2010 level. The lower FY 2011 funding level requires significant cuts in EIA's data, analysis, and forecasting activities. The following changes reflect steps necessary to reduce the cost of EIA's programs.

Reductions in Oil and Natural Gas Information

• Do not prepare or publish 2011 edition of the annual data release on U.S. proved oil and natural gas reserves.
• Curtail efforts to understand linkages between physical energy markets and financial trading.
• Suspend analysis and reporting on the market impacts of planned refinery outages.
• Curtail collection and dissemination of monthly state-level data on wholesale petroleum product prices, including gasoline, diesel, heating oil, propane, residual fuel oil, and kerosene. Also, terminate the preparation and publication of the annual petroleum marketing data report and the fuel oil and kerosene sales report.
• Suspend auditing of data submitted by major oil and natural gas companies and reporting on their 2010 financial performance through EIA's Financial Reporting System.
• Reduce collection of data from natural gas marketing companies.
• Cancel the planned increase in resources to be applied to petroleum data quality issues.
• Reduce data collection from smaller entities across a range of EIA oil and natural gas surveys.

Reductions in Electricity, Renewables, and Coal Information

• Reduce data on electricity exports and imports.
• Terminate annual data collection and report on geothermal space heating (heat pump) systems.
• Terminate annual data collection and report on solar thermal systems.
• Reduce data collection from smaller entities across a range of EIA electricity and coal surveys.

Reductions in Consumption, Efficiency, and International Energy Information

• Suspend work on EIA's 2011 Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS), the Nation's only source of statistical data for energy consumption and related characteristics of commercial buildings.
• Terminate updates to EIA's International Energy Statistics.

Reductions in Energy Analysis Capacity

• Halt preparation of the 2012 edition of EIA's International Energy Outlook.
• Suspend further upgrades to the National Energy Modeling System (NEMS), the country's preeminent tool for developing projections of U.S. energy production, consumption, prices, and technologies. Eliminate annual published inventory of Emissions of Greenhouse Gases in the United States.
• Limit responses to requests from policymakers for special analyses.

In addition to these program changes, EIA will cut live telephone support at its Information Center.

EIA's FY 2011 Congressional Budget submission, as well as its FY 2012 Congressional Budget submission can be viewed at http://www.cfo.doe.gov/crorg/cf30.htm.

Performance measures

As a statistical survey organization, EIA has used a variety of measures to assess its performance for many years, including measures to monitor operations of specific surveys and processes. In addition, we use several measures to assess our overall performance, and currently have three measures that we report on annually.

• Customer survey results: We have conducted at least one agency-wide customer satisfaction survey each year since the mid-1990s. The customer survey results provide important insights into how satisfied users are with our information, who our customers are, how our information is used, how often they come to our site, and areas for future improvements. Our most recent survey, which was fielded on our website in August/September 2010, collected more than 5,700 responses in three weeks and provided a wealth of customer information. Results are consistent with historical trends — 90% or more of the customers who responded to our survey are satisfied or very satisfied with the quality of EIA information. We plan to conduct another customer survey in the summer of 2011.

• Meeting scheduled release dates: Many users of our information rely on our data and products to be available on schedule. EIA has a consistent record of meeting its targeted release dates on 95% of its recurring products.

Additional information about our performance is contained in the Annual Performance Report.

For questions on the EIA Budget please contact Gale Kabat, (202) 586-2469; for questions on the Performance Measures please contact Preston Cooper, (202) 586-9839.

Last updated: August 2011