Program reviews strain OMB, agency staff

Formal evaluations of federal programs completed by the White House each budget cycle are labor-intensive and fail to provide specific enough suggestions for management improvements, the Government Accountability Office said in a report published Monday.

Examiners at the Office of Management and Budget are having a hard time keeping up as more programs are added each year to the list of those reviewed using a questionnaire called the Program Assessment Rating Tool, GAO said.

Agencies also are devoting significant time to the evaluation process, and while it has made managers pay more attention to performance, there is "limited evidence to date" that the PART has influenced program results, the report (GAO-06-28) stated.

OMB has evaluated 20 percent of programs each year for the past three budget cycles, and plans to look at all major programs in time for the release of the president's fiscal 2008 budget request. Examiners focus on new programs each year, but managers can ask to have their programs re-evaluated if they feel they've made substantial improvements.

Agency officials interviewed by GAO expressed concern that, because of a growing workload, OMB assessors were unable to agree to all requests for re-evaluation. As work grew, the examiners also had a tendency to broaden the definition of what constituted a program, to "help control the number of PART assessments that need to be completed," some agency managers told GAO.

When programs assessed are too large, the recommendations coming from the PART process are often "not specific enough to be useful," agency officials told GAO. Managers also expressed concern about the quality of OMB's reviews, given how little time was devoted to some of them.

"The assessments are less useful when OMB staff are unfamiliar with the programs or have too many of the PART assessments to complete," one agency official told GAO.

"Some officials told us that the heavy workload meant that the [assessments] were not completed in a timely enough fashion to allow agencies to appeal ratings or present new performance measures, sometimes resulting in lower PART scores," the report stated.

In response to the report, senior OMB officials acknowledged the ballooning workload but told GAO they were taking steps to address the issue, including introducing a Web-based tool that will help in data collection and automate the production of PART summaries. They noted, however, that agencies cannot appeal entire PART scores and are given ample opportunity during the review process to comment on specific issues.

OMB officials also said they are devoting more staff to the PART assessment effort.

"Although a senior OMB official acknowledged continuing capacity issues regarding the PART, he said that the PART is still a better way for examiners to accomplish their traditional program assessment responsibilities because it is more objective and transparent," the GAO report stated.

"OMB and agencies continue to search for ways to make PART assessments more rigorous and consistent," said OMB Deputy Director for Management Clay Johnson in a written response to the report. "Additionally, we are implementing information technology solutions to make application of the PART less burdensome and more collaborative."

The GAO report is based on reviews of the PART process for the fiscal 2004-2006 budget cycles. The auditors interviewed officials at four major agencies: the Energy, Health and Human Services, and Labor departments and the Small Business Administration.