Return to Article: NEWS+ANALYSIS For Good Measure
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82529
Ron S, you have provided such an eloquent and thought provoking explanation of the difficulties in measuring federal agency performance. Now how about devoting some of that energy into finding a way for federal agencies to measure their results!
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82427
As Albert Einstein once quipped "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." In the grand evaluation tandem "efficiency and effectiveness" federal agencies tend to measure efficiency (outputs) rather than effectiveness (outcomes) not just because they are easier to count but also because there is a certainty that the agency's actions (and not some external factors) resulted in the count. The difficulty in selecting a useful outcome is the uncertainty that what your measuring (a decrease in violent crime, a higher infant survival rate) is a direct result of what your output. And when the number of links in the logical chain reaction between output and outcome increases, so does the uncertainty. Agencies SHOULD strive to identify meaningful outcomes if for no other reason than to keep their focus on what they are trying to achieve. But if any President intends to budgetarily punish agencies that fail to achieve improvements, he's ignoring the tenous link between output and outcome and will only encourage agency executives to attempt to "game" the process.
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