OMB: Management agenda will outlast Bush administration

Regardless of what happens in Tuesday's mid-term elections and in the 2008 presidential race, the fundamentals of the Bush administration's management agenda most likely are here to stay, officials said Thursday.

In the area of information technology, for example, "I really find it hard to believe … that a president would come in and say, 'I really don't care about privacy, so everything you were doing in the area of privacy -- forget it, throw it out,'" said Karen Evans, head of e-government and IT for the Office of Management and Budget. She said a new administration in 2008 might make changes in where investments are made to reflect different priorities, but the basic elements of IT management likely will remain the same.

At a lunch hosted by the IBM Center for the Business of Government and the National Academy of Public Administration, leaders of the five key initiatives in the President's Management Agenda -- improving financial performance, competitive sourcing, e-government, performance-based budgeting and human capital management -- answered audience questions on the future of the efforts.

Robert Shea, who leads implementation of the Program Assessment Rating Tool, the administration's questionnaire that helps officials rate every government program, in part to inform budget decisions, agreed the initiatives will not go away with the Bush appointees.

"I think it would be a fine idea to enshrine these simple ideas in legislation," Shea said in response to a question. But regardless of the bills passed by Congress, "the clock is not likely to turn back [because] we're on the side of right," he said.

Linda Combs, OMB's controller, said the administration's quarterly traffic-light style score card to grade management agenda accomplishments has proven popular with private sector chief financial officers. She said the CFOs universally approve of the score card's simple format, and some assured her they would introduce it at their own companies.

"We'd love to see all of America on a score card," Combs added.

While some of the PMA's top advocates have been working from the initiative's playbook for several years now, Paul Denett, the OMB procurement policy chief confirmed in August, is full of new energy to tackle competitive sourcing - an effort to open federal jobs that are commercial in nature to bids from the private sector -- and other initiatives.

Speaking on the "retirement tsunami" that many expect to see crash down on the government as baby boomers retire over the coming years, Denett cited progress on a pet project to expand internships in the sorely understaffed acquisition field.

He said his office conducted a survey that found about 1,100 acquisition interns in 10 different programs spread across the government. Ranging from one year to 30 months, the programs introduce young people to procurement with the goal of enticing them to stay with federal agencies. Retention rates are not yet available, Denett said.

The procurement chief said a so-called acquisition "boot camp" at the Transportation Security Administration takes a novel approach of putting interns through the paces of an experienced professional by letting them work on simulated contracts, an experience they might not otherwise gain early on.

Two years from the administration's close, Shea said managers need to keep the focus on proselytizing and implementation to ensure that the PMA initiatives stick.

"Results speak for themselves," Combs agreed. "We're going to have to continue to … change the culture of what we're dealing with in federal agencies and departments in order to promote that great idea that it is as 'cool' to have an efficient and effective measure as it is to create policy."