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“We are clearly raising the bar,” exclaimed Mark Everson, the newly-named deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). He was speaking at a performance summit in Washington, DC in early April before a standing room-only audience of federal agency managers responsible for implementing the President’s Management Agenda. He, and other Administration leaders at the summit, conveyed a clear sense of action and commitment to the Agenda, which President Bush had announced in August 2001.
A panel of experts framed the overall initiative. Jonathan Breul, Everson’s senior advisor and a long-time OMB career executive, reminded the audience, “the purpose of the Agenda is to improve performance and results, not to just create better e-government or better management of human capital.” And Bob O’Neill, president of the National Academy for Public Administration, and an OMB advisor during the development of the Agenda last year, told them, “You can’t be successful if you develop your [Agenda implementation] strategy around each of the management agenda items independent of each other.” Chris Mihm, a director at the General Accounting Office, added the insight that “The scorecard is important only to the extent that it prompts progress.”
And it seems to be doing just that. The summit also heard from Cabinet-level officials who described how they were called into the Oval Office earlier this year, one-by-one, to be given their agency’s performance report card score. They each said the next time they go back, they want to report on their progress!
In addition, Labor Deputy Secretary Cameron Findlay, a member of the President’s Management Council, described a recent off-site planning meeting of the Council. The Council is comprised of the chief operating officers of the major agencies and is chaired by Everson. Historically, it has had a strong influence on the implementation of governmentwide management reforms. Findlay said the Council decided to organize itself into three subgroups to address the Agenda items. The task force addressing the financial performance and the budget and performance integration initiatives is chaired by Education deputy secretary Bill Hanson. This task force will look for common performance metrics that reach across agencies, such as the performance of federal government-run school systems (e.g., the Defense Department’s elementary and secondary school system for military dependent children and the school system run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs).
Parallel to Hanson’s task force will be an internal OMB staff Performance Evaluation Team, led by OMB’s lead on the budget and performance integration initiative, Marcus Peacock. The OMB team is developing tools and guidance to insure clear criteria around OMB’s planned future assessments of agency program performance. These tools and guidance will focus on how to develop performance ratings for individual programs as well as for making cross-agency performance comparisons of common functions. As described in an earlier column, OMB published assessments of the performance of over 100 programs in the FY 2003 budget for the first time. It plans to double or triple that number in the FY 2004 budget. To help OMB examiners do a better job, the OMB Team will develop criteria that define what good performance should look like, and make its criteria. The Team’s approach will be piloted during the annual Spring Review process that examines agency performance in the coming weeks. The tools and guidance will then be used in the full FY 2004 budget review later this year. To support the Team, OMB is planning to create an external advisory group.
In addition, according to Everson, OMB will shortly send out directives to agencies that will require them to better integrate their performance and financial reporting efforts and require agencies to report both on an accelerated schedule. The goal is to make this information available sooner so it can be used in the budget decision-making process. Everson says OMB has required agencies to combine their annual performance report required under the Government Performance and Results Act (by law, due March 31; six months after the end of the fiscal year) along with their financial report under the Chief Financial Officers Act (due April 30, by law), and that both should be reported by February 1st in 2003. The target is to, by FY 2004, report performance and financial results no later than November 30th – 45 days after the close of the fiscal year. Since the budget is due to Congress in the first week of February each year, having the information earlier will allow OMB and the President to use it when they reviews agency budget proposals in November and December.
Right now, only the Social Security Administration is able to meet this target. This, of course, will mean other agencies will have to drastically revise their existing reporting systems. Everson said “we need to be able to relate dollars to activities,” and that this means agencies will have to be collecting and summarizing their data all year long, not just at the end of the fiscal year. Phil Dame, the career executive who heads OMB’s budget analysis and systems division, said: “the most important thing of the budget and performance integration initiative is to get program managers to think in terms of goals and costs, and to be held accountable for them.” He also noted that there is a gradual shift in how OMB staff are making their budget decisions, with an ever-increasing focus on performance. Agencies in the future will have to bear the burden of proof as to whether their programs meet the OMB performance criteria before the programs will receive OMB support. This implies a greater future investment in program evaluation.
This spring, OMB will conduct another program performance assessment with agencies and this summer, OMB plans to publicly announce updated management scorecards, along with it mid-year budget review (generally in July or August). It may also release its assessment on whether agency plans to improve their scorecard scores are on target.
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