OMB ratings have little impact on Hill budget decisions

Lawmakers make funding decisions based on traditional budget justification documents, and pay little attention to the Office of Management and Budget's recent evaluations of federal programs, a House Appropriations Committee aide said Friday.

For the past two budget cycles, OMB evaluators have rated a sampling of federal programs on how well they deliver results to taxpayers. The ratings are intended to help administration officials and Congress link budgets to program performance, as encouraged by the president's management agenda.

But at a Friday forum hosted by the Performance Institute, an Arlington, Va.-based think tank, Michael Stephens, a senior staff assistant on the House Appropriations Committee, said he has never used OMB's formal program evaluations. He added that he has rarely heard fellow staffers discuss the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART), a series of roughly 25 questions that OMB evaluators use to grade programs as "effective," "moderately effective," "adequate," "ineffective," or "results not demonstrated."

Stephens was unaware that OMB had used the PART to evaluate 100 programs for the fiscal 2003 budget cycle and 234 programs, 20 percent of all federal programs, for the fiscal 2004 cycle. The majority of programs rated for the 2004 budget could not demonstrate results.

On average, the president's 2004 budget proposal rewarded programs deemed "effective" with a 6 percent funding increase, and held those "not showing results" to less than a 1 percent increase, according to Carl DeMaio, president of the Performance Institute.

If the administration is serious about drawing attention to PART, Stephens said, OMB should keep congressional appropriators more informed about the assessments.

"We're always looking for evaluation tools," Stephens said. Currently, the committee reads General Accounting Office reports, investigative reports, and think tank studies before allocating money to programs, he explained. The committee also has extensive contacts at agencies, and the ability to view program achievements in a historical context.

Stephens said he has seen a lot of presidential management initiatives come and go in nearly 30 years of working on appropriations. Each produces helpful results, but ultimately appropriators rely on such traditional tools as thousands of pages of budget justifications to make decisions, he said.

Such efforts as the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act, which requires agencies to develop performance goals and measure success at meeting those goals, can actually make appropriators' jobs harder, Stephens said. Following GPRA, agencies began presenting budget request information in a new format and appropriators have had trouble finding the data they need.

Marcus Peacock, associate director for natural resource programs at OMB, said PART is still "maturing" as a management tool. OMB will focus on ensuring that agencies answer questions on the PART consistently, and will help agencies derive useful ways of measuring programs' success, he said at the forum.

After these wrinkles are worked out, it will be up to Congress to decide how much attention to give PART, and how, or whether, the evaluations will influence appropriations. Some lawmakers have asked GAO to conduct a study on the PART's reliability, Peacock added.

Regardless of whether the PART ultimately influences funding choices, the evaluations are still useful in helping agencies identify and improve weak programs, said Nina Hatfield, deputy assistant secretary for policy, management, budget and finance at the Interior Department. The PART process has increased the dialogue between OMB and program managers, she said.

Hatfield and Ted David, chief financial officer at the National Weather Service, said they have found ways to communicate information gathered through the PART to appropriators. They justify budget requests to appropriators using some of the same information included in the PART, but present the information in a format appropriators like.

"A lot of things that [appropriators] are looking at come from PART or GPRA," DeMaio said. "They just don't know it yet."

DeMaio and other representatives of good government groups speaking at the forum emphasized that agencies should find ways of educating their appropriators about PART, or of translating performance data from PART into a format the appropriators could use. The appropriations process is steeped in tradition, and it will take a while to change the culture, DeMaio said.

Staff members of the House Government Reform Committee and Senate Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, Workforce and the District of Columbia, told forum participants that they believed in PART as a means of identifying subpar programs, and said they would like appropriators to pay attention to OMB's evaluations, especially during an era of rising deficits. But they assured agencies that a poor PART score would not necessarily lead to a program's elimination, or even to a funding cut. Sometimes, a bad rating might stem from inadequate funding, indicating the program actually needs more money, they said.