Government Executive - Authors - Carl DeMaio

Help Shape the Next President’s Agenda

Carl DeMaio — Fri, 17 Apr 2015 11:42:10 -0400

How can the next president avoid management mistakes and improve the performance of the federal government?

A bipartisan coalition of 16 good government groups seeks answers with the Transitions in Governance 2016 initiative launched this week. In keeping with the crowdsourcing movement that is so effective in solving other challenges, the Transitions in Governance initiative is asking for your input.

Each new administration comes into office promising to do things differently. Within each federal agency, new political appointees arrive, vowing to fix long-standing management problems. They quickly learn that changing the way government does business is incredibly difficult. Change-resistant cultures within bureaucracies, combined with complex and confusing statutes, can cause even the best and well-intentioned ideas of these political appointees to wither on the vine.

The goal of Transitions in Governance 2016 is to identify some of the greatest challenges the new administration and its appointees will face and provide thoughtful recommendations and reforms for consideration—a shortening of the learning curve, so to speak.

The initiative will examine what is and is not working in a variety of federal management areas, including performance management, information technology, data transparency, workforce recruitment and retention, acquisition reform, intergovernmental relations, and private sector and nonprofit partnerships designed to deliver government services in innovative ways.

The initiative will also tackle the political process itself, starting with the dysfunction in the current federal budgeting process.

Because we believe good management should not have a particular party label, our effort will be bipartisan. Drawing on officials from Democratic and Republican administrations, the initiative will capture candid observations from leaders who have attempted to implement management reforms in government in the past.

Ten Town Hall Dialogues with current and former administration officials are scheduled over the next 18 months. The focus of the first forum, slated for May 6, is the challenge of planning, measuring and evaluating the performance of administration initiatives and federal programs.

You do not have to be a former bigwig in government to offer ideas. The initiative seeks to gather ideas from both the general public and current federal employees through a series of online surveys. Everyone is welcome to submit their ideas and vote on proposed reforms as they are released. The first survey is available online at www.Transitions2016.org.

As the 2016 election cycle progresses, the Transitions in Governance 2016 coalition members will reach out to the major presidential candidates to support their policy shops—providing research and an inside perspective on government reform issues. What a candidate says on the campaign trail can turn into a commitment set in stone should they win. That’s why it’s important that we engage candidates on the campaign trail.

After the election, the initiative’s coalition members will issue a report to the incoming administration and congressional leaders. In addition to the Transitions in Governance initiative, coalition organizations have a variety of policy advocacy and educational programs aimed at supporting the transition team and eventual political appointees, whoever wins.

Tackling the long-standing management challenges in the federal government is hard enough. That’s why it is not only critical for the incoming president to have a management agenda from day one, but that the agenda is built on the good while reforming the bad.

Visit the Transitions in Governance 2016 initiative website at www.Transitions2016.org to share your ideas and track the progress of the project.

Carl DeMaio is the project director for Transitions in Governance 2016 and a senior fellow at The Performance Institute.

(Image via Daniel M. Silva/Shutterstock.com)

]]>

Powering Up Performance

Carl DeMaio — Sat, 15 May 2004 00:00:00 -0400

Creating an office on Capitol Hill to assess federal programs would put performance-based budgeting on the map. "Good cop, bad cop" is one of the oldest tricks in the book for getting unwitting criminals and disinclined teen-agers to tell the truth.

Perhaps we need a similar approach for getting to the truth about the performance of federal programs and linking budget resources to results.

Ever since the passage of the Government Performance and Results Act in 1993, champions of performance management in government have confronted two key challenges: generating quality performance information for each program and getting the executive and legislative branches to use that information in the budget process. Overcoming these two challenges requires performance management at the Office of Management and Budget, at federal agencies, and on Capitol Hill (particularly among the appropriations committees).

The Bush administration created the Program Assessment Rating Tool and committed to review the performance of 20 percent of federal programs each year and to tie budget requests to results of those reviews. No single evaluation tool is perfect, but PART is a methodological, standardized and evidence-based assessment that summarizes what we know and don't know about a particular program. The tool not only helps budget examiners do their jobs, but it also bridges the management and budget sides of OMB.

Now that OMB can manage the flow of program performance information and integrate it into its budget process, it's time Congress did the same.

For starters, lawmakers should pass legislation proposed by Rep. Todd Platts, R-Pa., to formalize the OMB program review process. While the legislation does not explicitly endorse the PART as the only viable method, OMB would be required to continue systematic program reviews regardless of which administration is in power.

Congress could improve the integrity of OMB program assessments by creating a Congressional Office of Program Performance to provide peer reviews of OMB's ratings. The COPP also would conduct its own program performance reviews based on member and committee requests. Perhaps the biggest selling point is that the COPP would help Congress sort through the reams of performance plans, reports and budget justifications that pour into offices on Capitol Hill.

The COPP would provide a much-needed balance to the administration's program assessments. It would create a healthy "good cop, bad cop" dynamic where political views drive differing conclusions about program effectiveness. Using review methods in both branches of government would make the process more transparent and facilitate an informed and healthy debate.

To avoid more congressional bureaucracy, the COPP should be staffed jointly by the General Accounting Office and the Congressional Budget Office. A joint committee made up of House and Senate members from the appropriations, budget and oversight panels should select which programs to review each year. Each chamber and political party should have an opportunity to choose.

Lessons from several states demonstrate that with beefed-up program review in the legislative branch, performance budgeting can become a reality. Florida-which has the most sophisticated performance budgeting system of any state-created the Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability to provide legislators with cost and performance information to drive budget decisions.

Without an entity dedicated to program review, Congress cannot adequately engage in performance budgeting-a vital tool for addressing funding and demographic challenges. And without Congress' informed input, agencies have no reason to pursue performance management. By putting a COPP on this beat, performance budgeting can become a reality at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

]]>

Pioneering Performance

Carl DeMaio — Mon, 01 Jul 2002 00:00:00 -0400

Performance budgeting-one of the five key goals in President Bush's management agenda-is nothing new. Agencies have been trying to do it for years, but most of their budget submissions still fail to clearly link their funding requests to program performance.

During the fiscal 2003 process, the administration used a traffic light scoring system to grade agencies on five broad performance budgeting criteria. Those criteria examined broad issues such as integrating planning and budgeting functions, devising a results-oriented strategic plan, realigning budget accounts with performance goals, charging full budgetary costs to performance goals, and demonstrating use of performance in making decisions. OMB gave all but a handful of agencies red lights for their failure to meet the goals.

The traffic lights helped focus attention on the president's goals, but they were too broad to affect budget decisions, which are made on a line-item basis. Moreover, some observers said the grading system was too subjective.

The daunting task of evaluating program-specific submissions was a problem, too. OMB assembled a small task force of OMB examiners under the supervision of Associate OMB Director Marcus Peacock to administer the ratings. Working tirelessly, the task force pored over reports from inspectors general and the General Accounting Office-as well as the performance data provided by the agencies. Moreover, the handful of budget examiners assigned to the effort could evaluate only a fraction of federal programs.

The program assessment tool for fiscal 2004 will help remedy some of these problems by providing more objective criteria for program-specific evaluations. The criteria include 20 weighted questions across four areas: program relevance, strategic planning, program management and program results.

To allow for cross-program comparisons of effectiveness, OMB has launched a "common measures" project for programs that address health care, wild land fire management, job training and employment, housing assistance, flood mitigation, environmental protection and disaster insurance.

Recognizing that performance budgeting requires resources, OMB has put more people on the case and will have six performance budgeting experts provide independent advice from outside government.

OMB's use of the Program Assessment Rating Tool, advice from the advisory council, and common measures won't be perfect, just as public sector budgeting will never be perfect. Nevertheless, using a standardized set of criteria, tapping outside expertise, and comparing the relative effectiveness of similar programs are steps in the right direction.

To make these tools work, OMB will have to overcome a number of obstacles. Among its own management challenges, some examiners still do not understand the difference between traditional (input-based) budget reviews and performance-based budget reviews. As one former OMB examiner insists, "We've always looked at performance when we review agency budgets. There's nothing new about this."

On the contrary, much of true performance budgeting is new. It involves a more transparent budget that incorporates real-time data on costs and outcomes and greater accountability for tangible program results.

As they begin to apply the new criteria, OMB examiners will find out that evaluating performance is easier said than done. Like the back-and-forth between the examiner and the agency on budget numbers, the reviews require a dialogue-primarily on performance measures and quality of data. Unfortunately, many programs do not have results-oriented performance measures. Indeed, some programs do not have clear performance goals.

Another hurdle is good old-fashioned politics. Even if OMB can overcome the technical challenges and generate solid cases that certain programs are not working, Congress and the administration can disregard performance information. Lawmakers and policy-makers can continue to fund politically popular programs, even if they are poor performers.

Despite the technical and cultural obstacles to performance budgeting, such tools as the program assessment ratings system and the kinds of questions it raises will provide better information for making decisions-both at OMB and on Capitol Hill. Performance budgeting won't eliminate the political forces at work in the budget process, but in time it will hold agencies accountable for the taxpayer's dollar.

Carl D. DeMaio is a senior fellow at Reason Public Policy Institute and director of the Performance Institute. Contact him at carld@rppi.org. ]]>