Lawmakers weigh institutionalizing program evaluations

House lawmakers are considering drafting legislation that would require the executive branch to evaluate the performance of federal programs on a regular basis.

Legislation would be one means of institutionalizing a program assessment process similar to that used by the Bush administration for the three most recent budget cycles, a staff member on the House Government Reform Subcommittee on Efficiency and Financial Management said Monday. The subcommittee on Wednesday will begin a series of hearings critiquing the Office of Management and Budget's current system for evaluating federal programs.

To help President Bush formulate his fiscal 2005 budget request, OMB evaluators reviewed 40 percent of federal programs using a 25- to 30-part questionnaire called the Program Assessment Rating Tool. Based on answers to the questionnaire, OMB designated each of the programs as effective, moderately effective, adequate, ineffective, or results not demonstrated.

While poor grades on the PART did not necessarily lead to proposed budget cuts in 2005, Bush did recommend eliminating 13 programs that did not perform well. These programs were either duplicative or showed little hope of future improvements, according to evaluators. Other programs earning poor PART ratings actually received funding increases in Bush's budget request.

OMB is still in the process of perfecting the PART, but the program evaluations have already revealed "a lot of useful information," said Robert Shea, head of OMB's budget and performance integration initiative, on Monday. The administration completed evaluations of 100 programs for the fiscal 2003 budget cycle and 234 programs, 20 percent of all federal programs, for the fiscal 2004 cycle. OMB expects to assess all federal programs by the 2008 budget cycle.

In hearings starting Wednesday, lawmakers on the House subcommittee will examine how the program evaluations fit in with the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act. The subcommittee also will review the General Accounting Office's recent recommendations for making OMB's rating tool more reliable and consistent.

In addition, subcommittee members will attempt to institutionalize some form of program ratings.

"We would have the philosophy that you should not try to codify the PART as it exists today because [it is still] evolving," the subcommittee staff member said. "But the process seems to be a good one."

While not perfect, PART evaluations are a "great oversight tool," the staffer said. The ratings help identify management problems that congressional oversight committees should investigate, and are a "good next step" to the strategic planning process required by the GPRA, he said.

PART does build on GPRA by making the program evaluation process systematic and accessible to the public, said Jonathan Breul, a fellow at the IBM Center for the Business of Government and a former senior adviser at OMB. Breul will testify at the hearing Wednesday.

OMB's formal program evaluations also force agencies to demonstrate that their programs are performing well, Breul said. "It used to be that programs were assumed to be effective unless proven otherwise," he said.

But Breul does not see any need for lawmakers to write legislation mandating similar program evaluations. GPRA provides a strong framework for measuring program performance, he said, and each administration should have the flexibility to design suitable program review tools to supplement GPRA.

Legislation "runs the risk of making [program assessments] a bureaucratic exercise," Breul said. "The PART is the tool that the [current] administration has found useful."

But the House subcommittee would like to find a way to ensure that a system for regularly assessing federal program management remains in place once it has been perfected, the staff member said.

"You would hate to think that when the Bush administration is no longer here, agencies would be asked to adjust to a completely different [evaluation system], or that the [program ratings] would be scrapped altogether," the staffer said.

The subcommittee could be ready to start on legislation as early as next week, when the second of the PART hearings will take place, according to the staffer. But lawmakers will not rush to introduce a bill. "We want to make sure that if we legislate it, we do it right," he said.

At a press conference last week, OMB Deputy Director for Management Clay Johnson said that he likes the idea of institutionalizing President Bush's entire five-part management agenda, but it is not a priority. Agencies would probably continue many of the management practices recommended by OMB even if they were not required, Johnson added, simply because the initiatives make sense and deliver results to taxpayers.