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Return to Article: OMB program assessments viewed as flawed budget tool

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  Hettinger's facile and self-serving complaints about tying the budget to the PART ignores two indisputable facts:

  1) The Congress has done an incredibly poor job of assessing the performance of the programs it authorizes and funds, and its members have rebuffed many opportunities to help create a performance tool that's of more use to them. Congress' view of good performance is that appropriations get spent. Then they can crow about at election time, as though it were an accomplishment.

  2) Executive branch agencies were doing little to nothing to assess their performance when this administration hit town. Nearly everyone was gaming GPRA by counting their ongoing activities instead of setting ambitious goals. And there was no accountability when goals were not meant. Tying the PART to the budget was the only way to quickly grab the attention of senior executives. It was a brilliant strategy that worked.

  The bottom line here is that those who appreciate accountability in government will support the PART, however imperfect a tool it may be, because there is nothing else. Those who don't support the PART favor the waste and corruption of the old days. Unfortunately, the Hettingers of the Beltway are working hard to make sure that those days come back.

  GovExec.com reader Posted April 7, 2006 9:05 AM
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  I hope that when this results driven, report carding, program assessing, agency destroying administration is finally finished and out of office we can go back to being a kinder, more humane service providing federal government. No Child Left Behind has driven school districts into obsessive, compulsive testing and our children are not being educated. The President's Management Agenda and PART has driven agencies into losing sight of their primary missions to meet unreasonable demands.

  I hope the next administration is sensible enough to file these programs into the round files next to all of our desks!!!!

  I say stop reorganizing and stop counting beans to meet arbitrary OMB requirements -- stop the micromanagement and let agencies go back to providing service to the American people.

  HR Specialist

  GovExec.com reader Posted April 5, 2006 8:09 AM