GPRA

What sparked his imagination?  Here’s a link to the hearing record.

Lead off witnesses included Chief Performance Officer Jeff Zients and Comptroller General Gene Dodaro (who Carper jokingly referred to as Zients’ “wingman”).  Here are some testimony highlights from Zients:

Executive Branch Implementation Steps To Date. 

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) surveyed the state of the art in developing and using comprehensive indicator systems in its 2004 report, “Informing Our Nation: Improving How to Understand and Assess the USA's Position and Progress.”  That report sparked an initiative by the National Academies of Science, with the support of several non-profit foundations, to explore the feasibility of developing a national indicator system.  This led to the creation of a non-profit, State of the USA,

Back in 1993, reformers thought that if agencies developed strategic plans, operating plans, and measures of progress, that decision makers would use the resulting information to manage better.  That didn’t work.  In 2001, the Bush Administration thought that if a scorecard of more discrete performance information at the program level was created, that decision makers would use it to manage better.  That didn’t work either.  In fact, a recent article in Public Administration Review by professors Donald Mo

Newcomer’s insight at the Brookings Institution forum on improving government performance was reinforced by OMB deputy director Jeff Zients’ keynote address – where he discussed his new responsibility to lead the effort to reorganize government functions.  He did not address the performance agenda.

So Where Is Waldo?

For the most part, the management section of the budget reflects a continued commitment to initiatives initially detailed in last year’s budget:

“Building a government that works smarter, better, and more efficiently to deliver results for the American people is a cornerstone of the President’s Accountable Government Initiative and a key focus of this Administration.”

This section of the budget is organized around the same three themes outlined in the FY 2011 budget:

The CRS report is relatively silent on the potential impact of the recently-signed GPRA Modernization Act on congressional involvement in setting government-wide priorities.  But it does a good job reprising the history of President Obama’s performance initiatives over the past two years, including:

Other Implementation Provisions.  The new law contains a number of other implementation provisions worth highlighting:

Federal Priority Goal Reviews.  According to the Senate committee report, the new law: 

“attempts to lay out a process for reviewing progress towards the federal government priority goals on, at minimum, a quarterly basis. For each federal government priority goal, the Director of OMB should review the progress achieved during the most recent quarter and the likelihood of meeting the performance target.

The original GPRA requires OMB to develop a governmentwide annual performance plan.  OMB chose to designate the President’s budget as meeting that requirement.   Separately, GAO’s 2004 report recommended a governmentwide strategic plan, but OMB saw that as infeasible.  The new law attempts another approach.

Agency Performance Updates.  According to the Senate committee report, the new law:

“. . . requires agencies to provide a performance update at least annually, occurring no later than 150 days after the end of the fiscal year. However, agencies are encouraged to provide more frequent updates that would provide significant value to the federal government, Congress, or – as noted in the statute:  “. . . program partners at a reasonable level of administrative burden.”