Administration hopes to leave performance management legacy

Last November, President Bush issued an executive order that, compared with more-contentious policy decrees from the White House, seemed utterly benign. Littered with such bureaucratic buzz phrases as "promote greater accountability" and "objectively measurable outcomes," the order directed all federal departments and agencies to name a staff person to take on responsibility for program performance.

But as officials move to implement the order by its September deadline, critics are raising questions about the administration's motives and the edict's long-term implications for federal program management.

Each department and agency must appoint a "performance improvement officer" charged with overseeing its strategic plan and determining the realistic likelihood of achieving its goals with available funding and other resources. This information will be shared among agencies at monthly meetings of a new Performance Improvement Council and made public on the Web.

The administration says that the order will improve program performance and ensure a higher level of accountability from top agency officials. But others suggest that it will open the door to greater White House interference in executive branch operations, possibly for years to come.

Much of the concern can be traced back to the Office of Management and Budget's controversial management initiative, the Program Assessment Rating Tool. Known by its acronym, PART, the system rates every federal program by using a simple questionnaire focused on the initiative's management, purpose, design, planning, and results. Thus, most, if not all, of the data that the new performance improvement officers will assess has already been collected.

OMB says that PART is a dispassionate arbiter of performance. But government watchdog groups characterize it as a politically biased tool that arrogates power to the White House and promotes the administration's ideological policies over agencies' statutory missions. Many of these critics fear that the administration will use the program improvement officers to entrench PART in the management of federal agencies before Bush leaves office.

"The administration has worked extremely hard to get Congress to accept PART as an unbiased evaluator, and it has failed. And the reason is because it's not unbiased," said Adam Hughes, director of federal fiscal policy at the advocacy group OMB Watch. "But it's the end of the administration and they want to make it work. So what's the best way to do that? Appoint people at each agency responsible to make sure that agencies continue to do PART."

OMB officials contend that the new positions are vital for a smooth transition to the next White House. "There should be no mystery that we are doing this toward the end of the administration," said Robert Shea, OMB's associate director for administration and government performance. "This is an effort to sustain what we think is valuable beyond this administration."

The executive order, Shea said, does not obligate the next administration to continue PART or the performance improvement officer initiative, although that is clearly Bush officials' preference. "PART is a useful tool and I would recommend that the next administration retain it as a way to ensure that programs are doing everything they can to improve," he said. "Having said that, the [executive order] does not, nor could it, lock the next administration [into using] this particular tool."

With its executive order, OMB hopes to shift the burden of ensuring program performance back to the departments and agencies.

By the end of last year, officials at each entity had selected a performance improvement officer. The majority of those chosen were career staffers who have established track records and who will likely remain in their role should the next administration continue the initiative. They include a host of senior executives -- at the Environmental Protection Agency it is Deputy Administrator Marcus Peacock -- several chief financial officers, budget directors, and program managers.

For some, like Kimber Boyer, the General Services Administration's associate administrator for performance improvement, the new responsibility is a natural extension of his full-time job. For others it is an added chore to be juggled along with daily tasks.

These mostly noncontroversial officers -- a notable exception being Paul Hoffman, a deputy assistant secretary of the Interior who once tried to open all federal parks to off-road vehicles, snowmobiles, and personal watercraft -- form the Performance Improvement Council. The group has already met four times this year and officials say it has made progress in setting realistic and aggressive performance goals, both within agencies and across the executive branch. The council has, for example, begun working to identify best practices for improving transparency and accountability and for streamlining the annual reporting of mandatory performance and financial data.

So far, the council's goals do not include embedding PART into the government's framework. "I have not sensed that as a specific agenda -- to single out PART," Boyer said. "Would [the administration] like that? Sure. But I have not seen any concerted effort to force-feed that or to mandate it." PART is just one of the many elements that the council is interested in, he said.

But with five years of data compiled on more than 1,000 programs -- all of which have begun working on improvement plans -- the next administration may find it difficult to completely dismantle PART. And switching to yet another program performance tool could just add grief and confusion for federal workers already drowning in regulatory paperwork.

Federal performance management programs have a tendency to live on, even after a new president takes over. In fact, PART -- and, to a greater degree, the performance improvement officer initiative -- builds on the Clinton administration's Government Performance and Results Act, which required agencies to set performance goals and integrate them into the budget-making process.

Although the Clinton effort was popular on both sides of the congressional aisle, PART has failed to drum up much goodwill on the Hill.

"We are concerned that the PART is not a meaningful analysis of program effectiveness but rather serves as a tool for OMB to criticize congressional actions in authorizing programs that the White House does not support," Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, wrote in response to the administration's 2009 budget proposal.

One supporter, Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Col., has sought, albeit unsuccessfully, to enhance PART's effectiveness by linking the program to the congressional budget process. In 2006, Allard suggested a 10 percent cut for any program rated as inefficient under PART. When that idea failed to gain much backing, last year he tried to block budget increases for programs deemed inefficient. That proposal also suffered a quick death, but the senator plans to reintroduce it this year, said Allard spokesman Steve Wymer.

"We must have a program that evaluates the effectiveness of federal programs, and we need a program that is taken seriously by the Congress," Wymer said. Allard's purpose isn't to protect the administration's priorities, the spokesman said, but to show that by ignoring PART, Congress is fumbling an opportunity to use a valuable tool in the budget process. Congress -- and even the Bush administration, at times -- has generally ignored PART ratings when haggling over program funding. Budgetary face-offs have focused more on lawmakers' individual priorities and on party dogma, rather than on performance data.

PART supporters begrudgingly recognize that suspicions about OMB's political motivations may limit the tool's effectiveness. "The best solution is to have a neutral body do the assessments, like the [Governmental Accountability Office] -- a body that is concerned strictly with evaluations," said Eileen Norcross, who studies PART data for the Government Accountability Project at George Mason University's Mercatus Center.

The administration, however, is not interested in abdicating its PART authority, noting that the GAO is permitted to opine on the assessments once they are concluded. "I have taken a lot of steps to ensure the objectivity of the tool, and even if there is continuing mistrust, all of the data, all of the evidence [on] which PART is based is available on the Internet" on Expectmore.gov, Shea said.

But some critics say that the structure of the Performance Improvement Council, chaired by Clay Johnson, OMB's deputy director of management, still prompts questions of political interference. Although Bush's order states that performance improvement officers report directly to their agency chiefs, they must submit all government-wide policy recommendations directly to Johnson.

Giving OMB such a direct line to department management can have a subtle but powerful impact on how programs are managed, said Hughes of OMB Watch. "We're not against appointing someone in charge of performance at every agency. We think that under the right structure it might be a very good idea," he said. "But coming from this administration, with their record on performance measurement, I think it should raise red flags."