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This first appeared as an ASPANET On-Line column in August 2001.
The Performance Gears of Government
by John M. Kamensky
August is traditionally a sleepy time in Washington. The President and Congress are gone on vacation. Steps down the halls of most agencies echo hollowly because so many have taken off for the mountains or the beaches. For those remaining, casual dress is standard.
But there’s an electric tension in small enclaves of many federal agencies. The planning and budget offices are in high gear. The deadline for delivering agencies’ drafts of their first performance plans and budgets under President Bush are due to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) by September 10th. And the President has high expectations of what they should look like. As the former governor of Texas, he is used to well-crafted, performance-based budgets. During the campaign, he had criticized the quality and usefulness of the plans drafted by his predecessor, Bill Clinton. So he has raised the bar. Back in March, Government Executive reported that the new Administration “will use the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act as the cornerstone of its efforts to improve federal management.”
Given this commitment as a baseline, where do agencies stand in being able to deliver on this new promise of performance?
The Results Act requires federal agencies to update their strategic plans every three years. Many agencies, at OMB’s urging, updated their strategic plans in late 2000. Some of the new agency leaders under President Bush have decided to launch new strategic planning efforts to reflect the priorities of the new Administration. However, Secretaries in agencies that are widely recognized as having good plans, such as the Departments of Transportation and Veterans Affairs, have endorsed the strategic plans they inherited. Agencies like these are automatically further ahead in meeting the President’s goal because they are able to focus on getting results instead of doing more planning for results. These Secretaries are using the annual performance planning process as their venue for reflecting the priorities of the new Administration.
Beyond the basic strategic plans, several recent studies suggest that there is a wide range in the level of sophistication in the basic infrastructure of most agencies’ managing for results systems. After four years of producing annual performance plans and two years of producing annual reports on their efforts toward meeting the goals promised in their plans, it’s still not routine. The General Accounting Office (GAO) recently observed that “much work remains before this framework is effectively implemented across the government” but also concluded that agencies are making progress in implementing the infrastructure outlined in the Government Performance and Results Act.
This past spring, the Mercatus Center at George Mason University conducted its second annual assessment of the quality of federal agency Results Act performance reports in terms of transparency (can you get them) and usefulness (are they readable). It concludes that there has been a marked improvement in the second year, but that more needs to be done to improve their usefulness. Their scorecard ranks the Department of Transportation and Veterans Affairs among the best.
This summer, GAO has been releasing agency-by-agency reports as part of its second annual assessment of how effectively key agencies are meeting the goals they set out in their Results Act performance plans for fiscal 2000. GAO is analyzing agencies’ progress during fiscal 2000 and comparing them to agencies’ fiscal 2002 plans to see what agencies intend to do to improve their performance in the coming year. While GAO has not finished releasing all of the reports on the individual agencies, it again is finding a wide variation in how well agencies both plan and perform. It also finds the Departments of Transportation and Veterans Affairs are doing a good job at reporting and developing new strategies to better meet its targets in the future, even though these agencies have missed some key performance targets. It also compliments agencies such as the Department of Commerce for enormous improvements over the previous year.
To date, the consequences for poor reports or performance have largely been slaps on the wrist. The Senate Governmental Affairs Committee has held hearings, GAO has written its reports, etc. But agencies have largely not suffered in the budget and appropriation process. However, this coming fiscal 2003 may be different under President Bush. OMB recently released new guidance to agencies in preparing their budget submissions. As promised, it introduced a new wrinkle – performance-based budgets. While long-promised, this is the first serious attempt to do it at the federal level. Maybe there will be a taste of Texas introduced in Washington after all!