The Numbers Game

A collection of good government groups met recently at the National Press Club to discuss the president's agenda. They talked about the relationship of performance and budget set out in the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act, and they discussed human capital management. The general agreement was that GPRA is only minimally successful and would work much better if agencies would get on with defining their performance goals and linking them to their budgets. Analysts and budget officials at the forum said the analytical tools are in place to evaluate agency performance. Complex public service issues, they said, can be quantified and reduced to manageable abstractions that represent reality. Let's get real. The reason GPRA has not yet a-chieved what its creators hoped is not the reluctance of agencies to define their goals and relate them to budgets, although there is some of that. The problem is that reality is complex and messy and does not lend itself to neat abstract quantification. Take the Defense Department. How do you define its goals and relate them to its budget? Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recently declared that we must be prepared to fight an unknown enemy at an unknown time in an unknown place. How do you plan for that? You don't, in terms of quantifiable budget goals. You prepare yourself to respond quickly to the unknown and improvise when a problem develops. You hope that your planning and budgeting have given you that capability, but you won't know until something happens. So, you plan for more than what you need, not less.If you plan for two major conflicts and none occurs, will the Office of Management and Budget give you a red light on its management scorecard? The last major war we lost, in Vietnam, was run by then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and his analyst whiz kids who thought you could project the outcome with equations on paper. It turned out that their neat projections (which had Congress salivating), did not work out in reality as they did in abstraction. When officials got real, they found that people resist getting killed with a passion that defies quantification.On the human capital front, the consensus at the forum was that civil servants should be paid better and respected more. True, but it is even more important that they be given challenging jobs. The way to attract and retain good people is to give them meaningful problems to solve. These two management issues have everything to do with the thermobaric weapons used in Afghanistan. Defense is an ongoing function and demands constant preparedness that isn't easily quantifiable under GPRA. But the need is real and has been demonstrated throughout our history. It took years of research to produce those weapons, first at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in White Oak, Md., and now at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Indian Head Division in Indian Head, Md. The capability to produce the explosive for those weapons existed only at the Indian Head facility, because Defense had spent many years testing and perfecting a variety of explosives. No private firm had the ability to produce thermobaric weapons. The specific application of the explosive was not envisioned, but still the Navy conducted the research over many years. Defense leaders understood the need to be constantly prepared for military conflicts.The reason the Navy has brilliant scientists who can synthesize explosive molecules like the ones in thermobaric weapons is that it offers challenging work. If those experts went to work for industry, government would be the loser. The government neither generates nor retains knowledge in its ranks when it contracts with industry for goods or services. The profit of production must go to the private sector, but knowledge of a problem, the recognition of who can solve it, and the ability to recognize the right solution are inherently governmental functions.The example of thermobaric explosives is but one of many in which the Defense Department has invested in readiness in anticipation of a need that couldn't be neatly quantified in the agency's performance plan. Thinking through goals and objectives and relating them to agency budgets is good, but eventually agencies have to get real. And reality is messy. If we are going to have competent civil servants who can meet the future demands of challenges yet unknown, we must anticipate the work they should be doing. The government is reaping the benefits of preliminary investments in resources and people. Let's hope we leave our successors with the same kind of capable public servants and facilities that were left to us-even if they can't be quantified.