Are We Governing For Results Yet?
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Publication Date: December 07, 1999 Other Availability:  Printer-friendly summaryPermanent Link: http://www.urban.org/url.cfm?ID=900304 Share:       Six years ago, Congress passed major legislation for government reform. The Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 (GPRA) requires, for the first time, that all federal agencies measure the results of their programs and restructure their management practices to improve these results. Since the passage of GPRA, the government in Washington has taken unprecedented strides toward increasing the effectiveness of its programs. A panel of experts at our First Tuesdays forum in December looked at the results of these efforts to date. Harry Hatry, director of the Public Management Program at the Urban Institute, moderated the session. He asked each of the panelists to look at what GPRA has accomplished, what it has failed to do, and what the future holds for the success of the reform effort. The panel included Jonathan Breul, a senior management official in the U.S. Office of Management and Budget in the Executive Office of the President; J. Christopher Mihm, associate director for federal management issues at the U.S. General Accounting Office; and Christopher Wye, director of the Program for Improving Government Performance at the National Academy of Public Administration. Members of the panel agreed that GPRA has led to progress toward results-oriented management in the federal government, but that much remains to be done. Full Transcript of the Session | Questions from the Audience HighlightsHarry Hatry, Urban Institute Jonathan Breul, Office of Management and Budget Christopher Wye, National Academy of Public Administration Christopher Mihm, U.S. General Accounting Office
"Now, the Government Performance and Results Act for the first time by statute, by law, requires federal agencies to budget, to plan, and to manage for results. This is quite different. Traditionally, federal agencies, all government agencies, focused on expenditures, which is, of course, very important. They focused on physical outputs, such as the number of investigations or the number of persons served. But the results of these efforts very seldom have been tracked by federal agencies and reported to the president, Congress, and the public. "The Government Performance and Results Act contains three major products that are of interest to us this afternoon. The first thing it calls for are strategic plans. These are supposed to be strategies going out for at least five years. The strategies are supposed to be prepared after consultation with Congress and with input from constituents. The first ones were delivered in September 1997. "The second major product of the Government Performance and Results Act is annual performance plans. Each agency and each of their major program, are required to provide not only output information, but outcome information. And that means measurable, quantitative numbers on outcomes that the program expects to occur during that forthcoming budget year, a very important piece of business. "It also called for the program to provide a target, a numerical projection, for the budget year on each of these output and outcome indicators. Again, the full implementation of the act was for fiscal year 1999. For those of you who aren't familiar with the federal government, that means fiscal year 1999 ended last September, September 30th of this year. The first plans were originally prepared in September of 1997. "The third product that agencies are required to provide to Congress is annual performance reports. Six months after the end of the fiscal year, each agency is required to submit a report that reports on the actual data as compared to the targets. The first annual performance reports are not due until March 31st of the year 2000, next March 31st. A main point here to keep in mind is that GPRA is very much a work in process. Full implementation has yet to occur. But we are well along."
"Some of those plans are, quite honestly, terrific. They're very good. And many of those are getting better still. Others are not so terrific, but they, too, are getting better. When one looks at them and reads across the government, and it's truly an enormous experience, there's a lot to be encouraged about, because the plans that we had last year for fiscal year 2000 were, on the whole, significantly better than those the year before. So what we're seeing is the agencies are getting smart about what they're doing; they're getting better about it each year; they're going to school on one another's plans and are generally getting better at this whole process. "Across the board, the judgment would be that clearly the plans are uneven in quality. There's not a common standard that we can find across the agencies. But, by and large, the agencies are defining their goals much better each year; they're doing a much better job describing what they plan to achieve. They're increasingly addressing the management challenges that are engaged in those programs. They're doing a better job of identifying data resources, and overall, again, I think the progress and the quality of what we're seeing is improving. "What's important to understand, I think, about GPRA is that at the same time it's not simply about measurement. GPRA is also, and perhaps more importantly, about communication. It's about how we describe the public purposes that these programs are engaged in, what kind of results they're trying to achieve and, as we'll see this spring, what kind of progress they're actually making, or not, in achieving those results. And gauged in those terms, GPRA is making a big difference. The nature of the conversation within the federal agencies, the nature of the conversation between those agencies and OMB, and in turn between the executive branch and the Congress, that conversation is changing. Typically in the past it had been all about inputs, all about dollars. If you asked the average federal employee to describe his program in capsule terms, he'd tell you how many dollars were being spent and how many employees were in the program. Increasingly, that conversation is changing now to performance and results and looking much more in terms of what the outcomes and accomplishments are of those programs."
"We have gotten to the point where in every agency we have a small group of highly skilled people designing strategic plans and performance measures by and large, but what they don't have is involved program managers, and I think that's the one thing that we want more than all other things. "There are many agencies where the top leaders know now about performance-based management, they know about it as a management trend worldwide, they know something about GPRA. But, at least from my perspective, they don't know it in a way where leadership is really being exerted, and I think they're doing the nation a disservice. As the world becomes much more competitive today—and that's really what's happening with the information technology revolution, the computer revolution—any margin is significant, and we ought to be focusing at the top on performance. "I would also like to see the Appropriations Committee staff take hold and pay a little bit more attention, although there have been some who have been taking this seriously. The issue of the relationship between cost and quality is where this is all going. If we're talking about accountability and management, every single issue comes down—just draw a line under it, add them up—it all comes down to cost versus quality. What does it cost us to do this particular thing? We're beginning to talk about that, but there isn't a broad enough recognition of it. "Also, I think the act talks about management, not measurement. Measurement is secondary to management. Whereas, some people are focusing too much on measurement itself. "There needs to be a linkage between events that are called for in plans and the ways they're carried out. The annual plan in GPRA requires a narrative explanation of how things are linked. If it were true, we would have real management. I suspect that most of those narrative statements are not true, because they, of necessity, cut across organizational and accountability lines in the agencies, and those kinds of connections are not made easily. "And the last thing I say is that GPRA folk in the agencies, the lead people, the very expert people in performance that we now have preparing the plans, and strategic plans in agencies, in my opinion, they need to begin to divest themselves a little bit. And I use that word advisedly because I want to just strike the brink of an issue here without going too far over the edge. A while ago, we had a bunch of people doing GPRA who were learning it for the first time. That was sort of the first round. Now we have people who have become very expert and they're building up kind of little cottage industries around them, which is good, you need staff, you need money. But they need to divest and get it out into program management. And if part of the reason that GPRA is not in the hands of program managers is because the managers themselves are not picking up on it, which is true, I believe another part of it is because GPRA leads are not entirely letting go."
"Plenty of times in annual performance plans of agencies you'll see references to the goal of this program, and the goal will be just to do something a number of times without any awareness or discussion that perhaps that really should be contributing to some broader social result. So that's the first, there still needs to be progress in thinking in terms of what are the real results that we want to achieve. "Second is the issue of continued coordination of cross-cutting programs. If you take a look at agency annual performance plans and strategic plans, we are now at the stage that generally they are identifying who the other players are that they work with. But the substantive work of actually coordinating cross-cutting programs is still very much a work in progress, and more efforts are needed. "Third, there's an effort, both within the executive branch—and certainly where I work up there—to work with the Congress, to better link budgets and resource allocation decisions to results. One of the difficulties of performance measurement in the public sector, and especially performance budgeting in the public sector, is that you don't know what to do with a poor-performing program. You know, in the private sector you can kind of get out of bad lines of business, or close down that store and move onto others. In the public sector, unfortunately, we can't do that. We don't know whether or not poor performance or a failure to achieve a goal is an argument for increased resources or reduced resources. So that's still an issue in linking performance to budgeting. And that's situational; it's not something you do across the board. "The fourth key area that I see is that we need to continue to make progress in aligning day-to-day activities and organizational structures to the results that we're trying to achieve. One of the problems that we saw with the annual performance plans, and this is really going to come back and haunt agencies in the annual performance reports, is that they didn't have clear understandings about how what they did on a day-to-day basis—products, services, outputs—led to broader results. "Fifth, there's a real need for agencies to continue to build the capacity to get performance information and to use that performance, and to develop the program evaluation capacities to effectively use that performance information. One of the challenges that I think agencies face is that there isn't universal understanding on the Hill that there's a variety of reasons for poor performance information, or nonexistent performance information, or why some performance information does not exist. Often there's a tendency to think it's either because the agency has not worked hard enough to get it, or is trying to game the political system or for a variety of other nefarious reasons. There is not, I think, a widespread understanding that often this is a result of conscious programmatic and policy decisions that Congress and the executive branch have put in place." Questions from the Audience
"I'm particularly interested in the concept of cross-cutting issues. It seems as though there's so much integration needed between different agencies, and that their policies are just not adapted to real outcome, proper outcome. I'd just like to know if families and crime are perceived as cross-cutting issues, and how you all are working on that." Mr. Mihm: "The short answer is absolutely, we have actually done some work, and I'll be happy to send it to you, on the broad array of federal programs that deal with at-risk and delinquent youth, everything from justice programs to programs in Health and Human Services, to education programs. And it's found, not surprisingly, that there's a patchwork approach to these, where often, and this is where local governments are really the leaders on this and have been kind of teaching the feds, is that often the problem with the federal approach is that they deal with children and their problems in isolation from one another. "What the federal agencies are now beginning to do is starting to understand that the inner connections of the various problems that children face in families, and the stresses families are under, are what drives those stresses, or what makes those important and intractable in many cases."
"You mentioned the involvement of constituency groups and the development of strategic plans. And I was wondering if you all could comment on the degree to which that's been done, and on other opportunities for constituents and their advocacy groups to become involved within the GPRA process?" Mr. Breul: "The act requires stakeholders, interest groups, employees—there's a broad range of people who are to be consulted. A number of departments went though extraordinary efforts, with town hall meetings and Internet discussions and the rest (to get input from stakeholder groups.) I suspect that more involvement could have occurred in the first round of planning, and more will occur the next time. But it was a new experience all around. Many of the departments did not get the kind of feedback they expected. They may not have known best how to reach out for it, as well. But, the act calls for that kind of opportunity. All those materials are up on the Web at this point, have been so for several years. And when the agencies resume their planning, I expect they'll all be out again seeking comments."
"Let's look at the issue of the Clinton administration proposing to put 100,000 more teachers in classrooms, independently of any evidence or very little evidence that the benefits from reducing class size will come anywhere near the possibility of other things (that could be done with the funding). When you have the leader emphasizing an input-based model, how do you expect individual agencies to buy into a results-oriented approach?" Mr. Breul: "How are you going to get agencies to buy in? I mean, there's a vicious circle we've got here. We at OMB can't make any decisions any better than the information and the proposals we get from the departments. And so, many of the departments point the finger at us, and we point the finger at them. But until we get everybody talking in these terms and providing the right evidence and information, it's going to be very hard to change the conversation up and down the line. And so, to the extent the conversation anywhere in the government isn't quite up to the standards you want, I mean, I think we all bear a responsibility to get the evidence, and get the evidence in thinking and the management of these programs, because we certainly at OMB aren't able to make decisions in the absence of that kind of information, and if we're given a policy proposal from a secretary, and it's absent that kind of information, we're handicapped."
"Crummy data or incomplete data. Is it a barrier to the agencies that a number of them still don't have clean financial statements, and can't get clean audits, and is this going to hamper GPRA?"
"I wondered if any member of the panel could offer an example of at least one program that over the last six years has actually improved its outcomes as a result of GPRA, or anything else for that matter?" Mr. Mihm: "There are plenty, and some of them are fairly well-known. The Social Security Administration is now one of the best in the business in terms of their telephone response time. They have benchmarked against other agencies in the private sector, and now the private sector comes down and visits SSA to see how to run an 800 telephone service. Bureau of the Mint has done a great job in terms of getting its coinage out. Food and Drug Administration has cut the approval time for drugs radically in recent years. We've reported on some of the work that the Coast Guard has done. In the marine safety area, back in the early 1990s, they were a well-run regulatory program before it became a slur to work in a regulatory program. And that is that they, if you went in and asked them how they knew how they were doing, they would tell you things about a regulatory program, how many inspections they had made, how many fines had been levied, how many corrective actions had been taken and all the rest. They stood back and asked themselves the true GPRA question, What are we in business for? We're not in business to run a regulatory program, we're in business to have a safer marine fishery program, and what that led them to do is analyze the costs of deaths and injuries in the marine fishery industry in which they used the euphemism that it was a lack of training for people in the industry. Basically what they were finding, from what we understand informally, is that people were getting drunk and falling off the ships at night. They started working with the private sector—you know, this is a regulatory program, so this was a real change in perspective—to tell the people don't drink, and wear your life vests. And as a result, they've had significant reductions in deaths in the sea industry over the last several years." Related Publications
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Harry Hatry, director of the Public Management Program at the Urban Institute, is a recognized leader in the development of performance measurement and evaluation procedures for public agencies. He notes that the Government Performance and Results Act lays out a clear program for more effective management.
Jonathan Breul is senior advisor to the Deputy Director for Management at the U.S. Office of Management and Budget. As one of the officials who helped develop GPRA, he notes that the act has at least moved federal agencies to create strategic plans for making sure that agency programs fulfill organizational goals.
Christopher Wye is director of the Program for Improving Government Performance at the National Academy of Public Administration. He says there are a number of ways that the GPRA process can be improved, beginning with greater involvement of program managers in federal agencies.
Christopher Mihm manages the U.S. General Accounting Office’s efforts on GPRA and oversees related results-oriented management initiatives. He says a great deal of progress has been made within agencies in terms of setting goals for results that matter to the public. But he points out a number of specific areas where GPRA can be applied more effectively in the future:
Margaret Feldman, National Council on Family Relations
Terri Feeley, National Association of Child Advocates
Bob Lerman, Urban Institute
Steve Barr, Washington Post
Jodie Allen, U.S. News and World Report