Editor's Notebook

EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK

The ruler adorning our cover this month suggests both the topic of Anne Laurent's story--performance measurement--and the consequences that might befall government managers who fail to measure up, so to speak, to the requirements of the Government Performance and Results Act. A rap on the knuckles for non-performers seems to be the message Republicans in Congress are sending about implementation of what they call the "Results Act."

This month we feature GPRA. Last month, activity-based costing and capital planning shared top billing. In April, an article titled "Buying Smarts,"
discussed sweeping changes in federal procurement. And last fall, articles titled "Get Wired" and "Technology Tamers" covered new mandates that program managers get involved in planning of information technology projects.

These articles share a common interest in congressional efforts to "reform" government processes. If readers know more about these reforms and the laws that undergird them, they will better be able to carry them out in good faith, we think.

The law is the law. But in the business of reform not all laws are created equal. Some pursue strategies quite opposite of those pursued by others. Also, in the reform game, the whole does not equal the sum of its parts. More reform piled on the sediment of prior reform does not a shining castle build. Often it just adds to the muck. As public administration scholar Paul C. Light observes, there exists among political leaders a continuing consensus for reform when the reform most needed is less reform.

In his new book, The Tides of Reform: Making Government Work, 1945-1995 (Yale
University Press), Light groups 141 reform statutes Congress has passed during the last half century into four categories of reform. The "scientific management" approach that prevailed early in the period put its belief in experts and bureaucratic hierarchies. The "liberation management" school, represented most recently by Vice President Al Gore's National Performance Review (NPR), wants to free line managers to manage. More ascendant now are two tides of reform more to Congress' liking: "watchful eye" and "war on waste." The former insists on oversight and disclosure of information, while the latter seeks a government that costs less (as does Gore's mixed-message NPR). Many of the recent laws emphasize reform in procedure-piling new procedures on top of old programs with little attention to whether the programs themselves are worth keeping.

Light argues that "we have precious little evidence that any of the 141 initiatives accomplished their lofty goals," in part because "the government has virtually no established baselines against which to measure success." GPRA may be different, since its purpose is to have agencies establish goals and measure performance. Certainly we can hope so, for the sake of the people in the agencies scrambling to complete strategic plans and performance plans by fall.

This month we welcome a new contributor to our pages: Frank Reeder on the subject of managing technology. Reeder's long career in the top ranks of federal management included service at the Office of Management and Budget overseeing acquisition and oversight of computers and telecommunications in the Executive Branch.