Harry P. Hatry
Note: An expanded version of this commentary is also available.
Providing the best possible government services to our citizens requires accountability and effective measurement of performance. It’s been 15 years since Congress passed the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993, which requires each federal agency to develop strategic plans, annual performance plans, and performance reports. The time is right to review the performance improvement process so the new administration can build on, and exceed, previous results.
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the federal agencies should focus on collecting, reporting, and using performance measurement results to improve services throughout the year. Twelve suggestions in particular warrant consideration:
- Appoint leaders who believe that obtaining good results for the country and its citizens trumps political partisanship.
- Revamp the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) to focus on results. These ratings, developed by OMB for each federal program, currently combine estimates of the quality of federal management processes with program results. Split off the ratings of management processes, and rate these less frequently. For budgeting and program decisions, focus on program results. Importantly, in any effort to bring federal costs down, the new administration should not use the current total PART scores to decide which ineffective programs to cut or delete. The scores, as they are combined now, can be very misleading and insufficient.
- Streamline the annual agency performance reports—Performance and Accountability Reports (PARs)—to highlight key information.
- Make the performance reports more useful and user-friendly by revamping the format and content and deleting marginal information.
- Strengthen agencies’ ability to provide the more detailed, tailored performance information needed to address particular issues that arise throughout the year.
- Encourage federal employees to use performance data to manage and make program and policy decisions. Simply satisfying OMB’s accountability requirements isn’t the end goal. These data can help employees get better program results now.
- Continue OMB’s practice of making performance findings public, but make the information more reader-friendly so more people will use it.
- Address issues that cut across multiple agencies and multiple programs. Juvenile delinquency prevention, substance abuse programs, economic development, and environmental protection are a few examples.
- Require that budget proposals, including annual performance plans, provide estimates of what the program plans to achieve in the future. Many programs cannot yield major results during the budget year alone.
- Routinely obtain sound explanations from agencies and programs for unexpected outcomes, especially poor results.
- Continue to evaluate selected programs in depth, but also encourage pre-assessments of the program’s “evaluability.” These assessments save time and money by ensuring that most subsequent evaluations are timely, useful, and offer sufficiently valid findings.
- Strengthen the analysis of the future implications of new federal programs and policies. Most federal agencies mainly generate data on past performance. For each major crosscutting policy issue, prepare a multiyear “strategic plan” and annually track progress through special performance reports.
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