OMB honored for program assessment effort

A questionnaire devised by the Bush administration to review the performance of federal programs on Wednesday won the annual Innovations in Government Award.

The Program Assessment Rating Tool, a set of 30 questions devised to help budget examiners write formal program evaluations that decision-makers, including legislators, can use in allocating resources across government, was the only federal initiative honored this year. The six award recipients stood out from more than 1,000 applicants and 18 finalists.

"I congratulate the hard-working employees at the Office of Management and Budget for winning this award and implementing our management agenda," President Bush said in a statement. "Taxpayer money should be spent wisely or not at all, and I am proud of the progress we have made . . . We are changing the way the federal government thinks about program management and budgeting."

The 18-year-old award program, sponsored by Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and the Council for Excellence in Government, is meant to recognize creative solutions to significant social or economic problems. Winners each receive a $100,000 grant to help others follow in their steps.

Several states, including California, Texas and Kentucky, have expressed interest in replicating OMB's program evaluations, said Robert Shea, the administration official in charge of the reviews. "I would hope this brushfire could spread throughout the United States," he said at the Excellence in Government Conference, a three-day event co-sponsored by Government Executive.

The PART questionnaire has been used to rate 607 federal programs, or 60 percent of all programs identified by OMB. Another 20 percent will be rated in the fiscal 2007 budget, and all will be evaluated in time for the fiscal 2008 budget cycle.

PART evaluations are intended to provide impartial information on whether a program has concrete goals, is meeting them, and is filling a need that isn't already addressed by another program, Shea said. The review system has no automatic relationship to funding decisions, he said, though the administration would like lawmakers to at least consider the assessments during the appropriations process.

In his fiscal 2006 budget request, President Bush recommended eliminating 99 programs deemed ineffective, duplicative or making inappropriate use of federal resources. The PART likely played into most of those recommendations, he said.

But there are only 22 cases where a decision to terminate a program can be directly linked to the results of a PART assessment, Shea said. Politics factors into budget decisions as well, he noted.

Both Shea and Patricia McGinnis, president and chief executive officer of the Council for Excellence in Government, acknowledged that PART is a far-from-perfect tool. But the ratings provide the most comprehensive picture of program performance to date, Shea said. McGinnis noted that the innovations award recognizes projects for their potential as well as for their achievements.

OMB still is having difficulty persuading Congress to embrace the performance evaluations, Shea said. Lawmakers are having trouble understanding that PART is not designed to force them into any budget decisions, he said.

"If they have a better way to fix [a] program, we're all ears," Shea said.

The administration will stand a better chance of getting Congress' attention if performance evaluations are required by law, Shea said. Recent legislation written by OMB would do just that, he said.

The PART has been faster to take hold at agencies, administration officials have said. But skepticism was also noticeable in questions Shea received from attendees of the Excellence in Government Conference. Audience members wondered how the evaluations could be considered impartial, and how Shea's own performance-and that of the OMB budget examiners in charge of rating programs-is graded.

OMB has a number of checks in place to ensure that budget examiners are consistent and fair, Shea said, noting that he personally looks over the evaluation results and does not think there's a "better entity" to provide "candid" reviews. Even such organizations as the Government Accountability Office-known to be independent-carry biases that could show up in evaluations, he argued.

Shea said he is responsible for helping program managers fix inefficiencies, and noted that his performance hinges on whether programs are making recommended improvements and achieving quantifiable savings. "On the congressional side, I'm not looking at a huge bonus this year," he added.

One of OMB's upcoming challenges is to share PART results with the public in a format that is easily digested, Shea said. The administration is developing a Web site to display the results.

OMB earlier this week asked a focus group to assess a draft home page and description of program results, Shea said. The group liked the site in concept, but had trouble with the results section. It became clear that those pages will need to be written in less bureaucratic language, he said.

The five other innovations award recipients were all state and local projects. More information on the winners is available on the Council for Excellence in Government Web site.