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PATImes
October 2008
Bush's Performance Management Legacy
by
John M. Kamensky
Over the course of his two terms in office, President George W. Bush has doggedly emphasized the importance of performance. In fact, his commitment started during his first campaign for president when he said: "Government likes to begin things . . . But . . . good beginnings are not the measure of success. What matter in the end is Completion. Performance. Results. Not just making promises, but making good on promises."
This served as a driving philosophy underpinning many of his management initiatives during his eight years in office. What mechanisms did he put in place to act on this? What will the next president inherit?
President Bush extended the performance framework created by the Government Performance and Results Act into a broader performance management system. The Results Act required agency plans, measures, and reports. Bush started with this a baseline and created program-level assessments, linked budgets to program performance, required agencies to conduct quarterly reviews and tied program performance to executive pay. In the past year, he created via executive order a network of career executives who focus on their agency's performance.
Status of PART
In mid-September, OMB released its latest, and possibly final, roster of agency programs that were assessed using the Performance Assessment Rating Tool (PART). It started this assessment effort in 2002. It reviewed about 200 programs a year and posted the results on a website: www.expectmore.gov. As of mid-September, OMB had reviewed 1,017 programs, covering nearly the entire budget. It rated 193 (19 percent) as effective, and only 27 (3 percent) as ineffective. It could not determine the effectiveness of 173 (17 percent) because OMB judged that those programs did not collect adequate performance information to make a judgment. Still, OMB says agencies have identified over 6,000 performance measures that track program outcomes, outputs, and activities that increase efficiency and have undertaken 4,000 specific program improvement actions identified as a result of the PART assessment.
The significance for the next president and his agency heads is that, after seven years of intense scrutiny and constant pressure to improve performance, 20 percent of programs still could not demonstrate whether they could perform adequately. These programs total about $140 billion (of which $18 billion of these were deemed ineffective). Both presidential candidates claim they will review every program and eliminate those that don't work. Yet, even if they agreed with the Bush PART assessments and successfully eliminated these 200 programs, it would not make a dent in the projected $500 billion deficit.
Status of Performance Budgets
Agencies are required by the Results Act to develop an annual performance plan. In recent years, OMB has encouraged agencies to integrate this plan into their annual budget justifications to Congress. OMB guidance, in fact, says: "Your submission should include descriptions of the means and strategies, including resources, processes, and technologies, to be used in achieving the performance goals."
According to professor Paul Posner, in testimony before the House Budget Committee last year: "OMB encouraged agencies to restructure their budget presentations and underlying account structures to better align budget resources with performance goals. Beginning with the fiscal year 2005 budget, OMB required agencies to submit a 'performance budget' that would integrate the annual performance plan and the congressional budget justification into one document."
Agencies have done this. For example, the Department of the Treasury's Office of Performance Budgeting and Strategic Planning has created a framework for the department's budget that includes not only each bureau's mission statement, objectives, and priorities for the coming year, but also how the budgeted amounts for these priorities tie back to their strategic goals. The U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing's performance statement, for example, describes how it prints "high quality security documents" (e.g., dollar bills) that deter counterfeiters with their new design, and how they are educating the public to detect counterfeits and contributes to public confidence. It also provides the unit cost of producing and securing the dollar bills it prints.
The department's technical approach to developing its performance budget is being gradually being adopted by other federal agencies as well. Federal budget officers have created a cross-agency collaborative network to share best practices.
Status of Agency Reviews
The Administration also required agencies to conduct quarterly reviews of their performance and progress toward their goals and targets. In many agencies, this created a new look at what they were doing and how they did their work. For example, the Environmental Protection Agency produces a quarterly report that examines both environmental indicators as well as the internal management benchmarks for EPA itself. In order to institutionalize this approach, EPA recently adapted the award-winning Baltimore CitiStat approach to performance management to its own operations. EPA now has an EPAStat which goes beyond a quarterly report to a sit-down meeting of key executives to discuss progress and revise strategies to improve performance.
Status of PIO Roles
As a result of an executive order signed by President Bush last November, all agencies have designated a Performance Improvement Officer. A number of them are their agency's chief budget officer. Others are their agency's lead in strategic planning or performance measurement. In the Department of Veterans Affairs, for example, Dan Tucker is the deputy assistant secretary for budget. He says he created a performance improvement council within the department that is comprised of career executives responsible for planning, performance, and financial management. He says the department develops a program improvement plan for each of its programs assessed under the PART and has implemented a new performance appraisal and awards system that links directly to the departmental mission and goals. He says that by revising its budget justifications to Congress, "our request for resources is now justified not only by the kinds of activities we will conduct, but more importantly by the results we expect to achieve."
Status of PIC
The executive order also created a government-wide Performance Improvement Council. It has been meeting monthly since it was formed earlier this year. It has focused on improving individual agency goals and plans to achieve them. It is currently chaired by Sid Kaplan, a career executive at the State Department who is highly regarded by his peers across government. It is supported by OMB staff. The Council is divided into four subcommittees that develop and bring issues to the broader group. These include:
a subcommittee on program evaluation, which provides peer support for improving the validity, quality, and usefulness of program evaluations. It has created a standing group of experts that agencies can turn to for advice on methodologies.
The council has developed a plan of action that will continue through 2009, such as training and information sharing activities.
Status of Transparency and Reporting
Probably one of the boldest actions the president has taken in performance improvement has been his willingness to publicly release extensive amounts of information related to the performance of individual programs assessed under the PART and reported in the budget. The ExpectMore.gov website not only includes the PART scores, but also the backup materials used to develop these scores and what agencies plan to do to improve. In addition, a three-tier set of performance-related reports will be published in the coming months.
First, most agencies will continue to publish their combined performance and financial reports by November 15th. Early in the Bush Administration, these statutorily required reports were accelerated from March 30 - six months after the end of the fiscal year - to November 15 - six weeks after the end of the fiscal year -- so that this information would be available during the budget development process. Second, a set of about ten pilot agencies will separate their financial from their performance reports. These pilot agencies will prepare three separate reports: (1) their financial reports will be submitted on November 15th; (2) they will submit their performance information as an integrated part of their budget submissions in February; and (3) these agencies will also submit a "citizens' report," not to exceed 25 pages in length (all other agencies are encouraged to submit one, but are not required).
And third, all agencies will be asked, for the first time, to prepare a 2-page "performance snapshot" to be published in January 2009. This snapshot will provide an overview of an agency's mission, organization, budget, and performance and financial results.
Will Performance Improvement Survive the Transition?
The next president will inherit a performance management system that includes not only a rich database of assessments of more than 1,000 programs, but also staff in OMB and agencies that have experience in conducting such assessments. Together, they have identified inputs, outputs, outcomes of existing agency programs using random control trials, logic models, and a range of other performance assessment techniques. They have a network of officials within and across the government, and they have a reporting framework for sharing this information.
The new president can choose to build on this system, reshape it, or discard it. However, some form of performance improvement initiative will likely continue. Both candidates have said they will conduct program-by-program reviews to find what doesn't work, and fix or eliminate them. The likely starting point will be the existing PART reviews, since that is the only comprehensive resource of program-level performance information.
Senator Obama has said that he would keep PART, but "open up the insular performance measurement process to the public, Congress and outside experts." He also said he will ensure that programs are not measured in isolation "but are assessed in the context of other programs that are serving the same population or meeting the same goals." He also said he will designate a chief performance officer who will report directly to him. That person will oversee agency goal- and target-setting and track progress. As of this writing, Senator McCain has not described his management approach.
Will PART survive? Likely, and with some refinements. Will the network of executives created by executive order survive? Again, that is an unknown, but the designation of a single point of accountability for performance information in agencies has led to greater clarity in agencies around "who's in charge." What about performance budgeting and reporting? Again, an unknown, but some form of both will likely survive. Many agencies hope that these are streamlined, though. OMB has created a single point of access for all agency strategic plans, performance reports, performance budgets, and PART materials. This will likely serve as a starting point for the next president's budget director.
The Government Accountability Office, in a recent congressional hearing on the Administration's performance initiatives, chose not to focus on this level of specificity. Instead, it suggested that the next administration should "(1) adopt a more strategic and crosscutting approach to overseeing government-wide performance; (2) improve the relevance of performance information to Congress, and (3) build agency confidence in assessments for use in decision making." This leaves some flexibility for the next president!
John Kamensky is a senior fellow with the IBM Center for The Business of Government. He is also an associate partner with IBM Global Business Services and a fellow of the National Academy for Public Administration. He can be reached at john.kamensky@us.ibm.com.