As time has gone on, the gathering of performance data has become increasingly common. But there’s still a major hole. Even entities that produce carefully prepared performance reports often don’t use them in the legislative process. More commonly they are used within agencies to make managerial improvements. But when it comes time to shifting policy direction or debating funding, measures are all too often ignored.

ARA funds were accompanied by a new, centralized system of strict financial accountability and performance reporting, with frequent reporting requirements. These new requirements, as well as the rapid implementation timeframe required by ARA, created an enormous implementation challenge for all the participants in our federal-state-local-nonprofit intergovernmental system.

In January of 2009, passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (H.R. 1) was the most immediate legislative priority for the incoming Obama administration. The need for speed in enacting the bill was driven by the increasing severity of the economic crisis that came to be known as “The Great Recession.” In fact, as additional data for the fourth quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009 became available during early 2009, the sense of urgency increased. The recession was worse than the administration’s economic team had realized.

Last month, the IBM Center issued a report examining the implementation of the Recovery Act from a “bottom-up” perspective of several cities in the state of Virginia, and what insights they offered from their implementation experience.  Now, here’s a new report with a “top-down” perspective, authored by Ed DeSeve, who oversaw the implementation of the Recovery Act from Vice President Joe Biden’

Read the report.

In an ideal world, we believe, this would be a time when governmental entities would be able to devote more energy than ever to the use of analysis to make sure that the limited dollars they have to spend are used most effectively and efficiently.

In 2009, the Recovery Act provided a one-time boost in spending to state and local govern­ments of more than $275 billion which was distributed via 65 different new or existing federal programs. This one-time increase in state-local spending was nearly 60 percent over the previous year!

These funds were accompanied by a new, centralized system of strict financial accountability and perfor­mance reporting, with frequent reporting requirements. These new requirements, as well as the rapid implementation time­frame required by the Recovery Act, created an enormous implementation challenge for all the participants in our federal-state-local-non­profit intergovernmental system.

On Monday, June 13, in a 4-minuteYouTube message to the American people, the President sat next to a stack of Federal Registers to highlight the steps he taking to take to get rid of “pointless waste, stupid spending.”  

Katherine Barrett and Richard Greene began writing for the IBM Center for The Business of Government on their blog covering the