Congress critical in linking performance to budgets, NASA official says

Without cooperation from Congress, the Bush administration will have difficulty prompting federal agencies to get the most bang for their budgets, a NASA management adviser said Tuesday.

President Bush's five-part management agenda asks agencies to consider the performance of past projects when formulating budget requests. In turn, Congress is expected to base funding decisions partly on agencies' progress at meeting goals.

If Congress fails to do so, it sends the wrong message to agencies, said Lloyd Blanchard, senior adviser for financial management at NASA. Agencies will have no incentive to manage programs efficiently and prepare thorough reports documenting their results if they believe that lawmakers are not paying attention, he said. Blanchard, formerly the chief operating office of the Small Business Administration, spoke at a Capitol Hill workshop hosted by the Mercatus Center, a Fairfax, Va.-based policy institute run by George Mason University.

"It really is important for those who work in Congress, especially appropriators, to take this seriously," Blanchard said. In addition to appropriators, who divide up federal funds, congressional authorizers, who set parameters for various programs, should outline clear expectations for agency performance, Blanchard said.

While authorizing committees already do this to some extent, they need to be much more detailed and explicit in their demands, Blanchard said. Philip Joyce, associate professor of public policy and public administration at The George Washington University, made a similar recommendation in a research paper published recently by the IBM Center for the Business of Government.

Administration officials could also place more pressure on Congress to abide by President Bush's budget request, which should reflect agencies' success at meeting performance standards, Blanchard said. At one extreme, the administration could even recommend that the president veto appropriations bills that continue to fund poorly performing programs when more efficient alternatives exist, he said. But budget officials may be reluctant to use such a "big stick" for enforcing a management initiative, he acknowledged.

Administration officials have used the threat of a veto to show support for other management initiatives. During the fiscal 2004 budget process, the administration has repeatedly threatened to veto budget bills containing language perceived as impeding its plans to subject thousands of federal jobs to competition from private firms.

A lack of dramatic action in linking budgets to performance doesn't mean the effort has failed, said Maurice McTigue, director of the Government Accountability Project at the Mercatus Center. There is often a "lag time" in implementing broad government reforms, he noted.

During that time, agencies can still benefit from completing detailed analyses of how they are spending their budgets and what they have accomplished for each dollar spent, Blanchard said. This will help them better allocate financial resources, and provide lawmakers and administration officials with documentation of areas where money is spent wisely, and areas where improvements in efficiency are possible, he said.