OMB enlists management council to push reform goals

The Bush administration has redesigned the President's Management Council, making it responsible for applying the Bush administration's government reform agenda across federal agencies, Office of Management and Budget Controller Mark Everson said Tuesday.

Everson chairs the President's Management Council, which is made up of the deputy secretaries at each department. OMB has divided council members into three working groups focused on three of President Bush's five top management priorities: human capital, e-government, and integrating performance criteria into the budget, Everson said Tuesday at a Washington conference sponsored by the Performance Institute, an Alexandria, Va.-based good government group.

OMB is using the council to prod departments into embracing the management agenda, a step the Clinton administration did not take with its government reform initiative, the National Partnership for Reinventing Government, Everson said.

"A lot of times [NPR] operated around departments and agencies and as a result it didn't get buy-in from senior managers," said Everson.

Council members are using the Bush administration's traffic-light scorecard, which shows whether agencies have fulfilled the five management initiatives, to enlist support for the President's management agenda at the department level. An updated version of the scorecard will be released at the end of June following OMB's mid-session review of agency budgets. OMB is also thinking of releasing an internal scorecard that tracks agency progress in meeting the goals, Everson said.

OMB is also working to improve its method for linking budget decisions to program performance. The budget office used performance criteria to guide funding decisions for more than 100 programs in the administration's fiscal 2003 budget proposal, but OMB officials admitted their rating process was imperfect.

A team of OMB analysts is now working with budget examiners to develop better performance criteria, said Jonathan Breul, senior adviser to the deputy director for management at OMB. The team intends to develop rating methods that consider different methods for delivering federal programs. Under this method, a program implemented by federal employees is not evaluated the same way as a program administered through grants, according to Breul.

This effort drew praise from John Kamensky, director of the managing for results practice at the PricewaterhouseCoopers Endowment for the Business of Government and a former deputy director of NPR. "It's a very significant development," he said, noting that NPR had not tried to refine performance criteria.