The Results Act: Playing Chicken

ike a flock of Results Act Chicken Littles, Republican legislators spent the last half of 1997 proclaiming, "The strategic plans are failing! The strategic plans are failing!"

The Senate Governmental Affairs and Appropriations committees held a joint hearing June 24 where they rated agencies' draft Government Performance and Results Act strategic plans and warned agencies their fiscal 1998 funding hinged on delivering acceptable final plans by the law's Sept. 30 deadline. In September and again in November, House Majority Leader Dick Armey delivered thundering denunciations of agencies' plans. In November, no agency won better than a C for its final plan. The vast majority got Fs.

The congressional ratings caught many top agency officials by surprise, and the shock of low ratings caused some to castigate the staffers who had toiled diligently in the trenches to produce the plans.

As unfortunate as this pass-the-buck reaction may have been, it's clear GPRA grades got results: Among the upper echelons GPRA is getting far greater attention than ever before. As Office of Management and Budget Director Franklin Raines told the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight Oct. 30, "An agency's strategic plan cannot be written by the staff for the staff." The leadership must lead.

What isn't so clear is whether the legislators doing the GPRA grading have the political courage to acknowledge Congress' role in creating and failing to solve the problems for which they now excoriate agencies. For example, one of Armey's chief complaints is agencies' failure to address their overlapping programs and responsibilities. But who created all those redundant programs, anyway?

Here's how Congress' own General Accounting Office auditors carefully answered the question in June: "As Congress and the executive branch have responded to new national needs and problems, many different agencies have been given responsibility for addressing the same or similar national issues." ("The Government Performance and Results Act: 1997 Governmentwide Implementation Will Be Uneven," GGD-97-109).

Congress, not just the agencies, must shoulder the ax to cut redundant programs, no matter whose district or which lobbying group they were created to please.

GAO has written extensively about the problems agencies face in carving their mission priorities out of the morass of competing requirements, statutory and otherwise. The Forest Service, for example, is hamstrung by the competing demands of conservation, logging and recreation. Yet forest management laws offer "little guidance for the Forest Service in resolving conflicts among competing uses," GAO has found. Isn't it lawmakers' duty to make hard political choices like these on the public's behalf?

Legislators' incessant focus on grading strategic plans also may miss a key point. GPRA's focus is results, yet Congress keeps grading the process. It's no shock that agency plans aren't perfect; GAO predicted that last June. In fact, agencies may be due accolades for getting in their plans at all, says Paul Light, author of The Tides of Reform: Making Government Work, 1945-1995 (Yale University Press, 1997). He hopes the Results Act will add substance to the debate about agency performance by providing hard data for the first time.

Then the onus will be back on Congress to use responsibly the information agencies provide in their annual performance plans beginning in 2000. If recent action is any guide, there's reason to keep a close eye on what legislators do with this data, as well as what they say about it. For example, witness the argument between representatives and agency staffers over goals for reducing drug use.

Armey and other Results Act aficionados recently hailed the House-passed Office of National Drug Control Policy reauthorization bill because it contained six legislatively mandated agency performance goals. The bill orders ONDCP to reduce teen-age drug use by 90 percent and halve the number of Americans using drugs by 2001. But the agency's plan says halving drug use will take 10 years. Drug czar Barry McCaffrey called the House goals unrealistic. Armey, on the other hand, suggested, "This is how we can all use Results Act principles as we do our legislative work." But what will lawmakers do when ONDCP sticks to its plan and reports progress, but not a 50 percent reduction, in 2001?

Legislators should set rhetoric aside when it comes time to weigh performance information in funding decisions. "One response to poorly performing programs may be to cut or eliminate resources," Raines noted Oct. 30. "But perhaps with more money allocated differently, or new managers, or a different management approach, performance of these programs would improve. If the automatic consequence of poor performance is to end the program, then soon the only performance reported will be good performance."

Such a measured approach would imply that improving government performance, not simply eliminating programs, is the goal of the Results Act. After all the grading and rating and huffing and puffing are over, appropriators' actions will give the law its true effect. Their wisdom or foolishness will demonstrate whether legislators are serious about results, or merely crying wolf.