This is a difficult and sometimes terrifying communique, and it comes from many sources. The President, the Office of Management and Budget, Congress, even governors and state legislators all ask for the identification of low priority programs: those that are outdated, are not achieving their objectives, or even those which have achieved their objectives and therefore are no longer required. A memorandum in response to such a request is presented here. The tact taken by the fictitious administrator of the equally fictitious Human Resources Department is: "How do I really know if my programs are low priority?" To many readers, it must seem that it is a little late for asking such a question. Certainly, administrators know their priority programs, don't they? Aren't priorities set in advance and isn't performance measured regularly? How else are programs designed and managed? Yet, as the memorandum will show, underlying what may sound like a naive and relatively simple-minded question are very complex issues with which administrators often are not able to grapple. Seldom has the ground work for a truly evaluative answer appropriately been laid. Intuition and political "sense" abound, but often in areas that could be the subject of a more definitive approach. Put differently, the question of low priority programs is a sensible one and deserving of better answers than simply a sense of the "politic." This article is couched in terms of a truthful, * The request to identify low priority programs is a very real one. It comes with regularity to administrators at all levels in government. This article is cast in the form of a hypothetical memorandum replying to an equally hypothetical request from the Federal Domestic Council, over the President's signature. In this case, the fictitious administrator has taken it upon himself to explain the problems he has with the request. Such a reply probably would be deemed unresponsive from an operational standpoint. However, the purpose of the memorandum is to give some insights into the problems of identifying low priority programs. As will become clear, such identification is not a short-run undertaking, but involves major changes, particularly in the way programs are designed, how their objectives are articulated, and how resources are spent on evaluation. The latter are generally too few and of too short a duration to get at the substance of the low priority issue.