By the end of this month, OSHA and every other federal agency will give the Office of Management and Budget a strategic plan detailing goals for at least the next five years. The plans will then be turned over to Congress, which, in theory, will use them to judge how well each agency performs.

You can say this exercise attempts to answer the question: "What exactly do all those people in Washington do?" It comes out of the Government Performance and Results Act, which was signed into law in 1993 to try to quell the public's growing dissatisfaction with the federal bureaucracy. No arm of the government has had its effectiveness, or existence, questioned more than OSHA, and the agency has spent the past 18 months drawing up a six-year plan to show its worth and improve its image. But will anyone-inside or outside OSHA-take it seriously? Bureaucratic documents, like General MacArthur said of old soldiers, tend to just fade away. But this is different, says OSHA press spokesman Stephen Gaskill. "We are committing publicly and in writing to Congress and the president our goals. It's easy to be cynical about it, but the process forces us to seriously review the way we work and the mission of the agency."