OMB seeks focus on useful performance data

The Office of Management and Budget won't use Performance.gov, the new website that tracks agencies' progress toward achieving high-priority goals, to issue letter grades on their performance, an OMB official said Wednesday.

Shelley Metzenbaum, OMB's associate director for performance and personnel management, said the Obama administration's goal is to build a performance management system in which outcomes matter.

Speaking at a Government Executive Leadership Briefing, Metzenbaum said any performance management system that cannot be used up and down the management chain is "a wasteful enterprise."

"Our mantra is 'useful, useful, useful,' " she said.

Agencies currently are using Performance.gov to upload data about their progress toward meeting the high-priority goals they identified earlier this year as part of a presidential directive on improving government performance. Metzenbaum said the site would be made public "in the not-too-distant future," but declined to give a specific date. When the site is rolled out, OMB will not lock or hide any parts of it, she said.

"This is a transparent administration," Metzenbaum said. "But you need to give us some time to kick the tires and see if the car will run and roll where we want it to run. We're still in the kicking stage."

Metzenbaum declined to speculate on how many agencies might successfully meet their goals. "We asked agencies to set ambitious targets," she said. "We don't expect to meet all of them."

Quoting former New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, Metzenbaum said agencies would be penalized not for failing to meet goals, but for lacking the data to analyze problems that arise and to change course if needed.

"The word 'why' should be one of most frequent words we talk about in performance management," Metzenbaum said. "We're looking for patterns, relationships and anomalies."

OMB has no plans to lobby for the repeal of the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act, or to stop using measures agencies developed for the Program Assessment Rating Tool under the Bush administration, if the measures are useful, according to Metzenbaum. Instead, the Obama administration wants to incorporate those performance management systems into its own approach.

Metzenbaum noted that while GPRA requires agencies to set goals and measurements for their programs, it doesn't create a system for giving priority to certain goals. And she argued that while PART has agency performance officers asking the right questions, the tool can be subjective and is used on individual programs only once every five years.