Outgoing Bush team sums up management progress

The Office of Management and Budget released three reports on Thursday that illustrate the extent to which agency performance and its measurement has improved over the course of the Bush administration.

One of the reports, the final quarterly President's Management Agenda score card, showed agencies making nine improvements during the first quarter of fiscal 2009 and suffering only one ratings downgrade.

Four agencies moved up in the e-government category on the score card, all achieving green ratings. Four agencies also improved in financial performance, while one, the General Services Administration, fell from green to yellow.

Since the 2001 baseline evaluation, the quarterly score card has been a tool for tracking agencies' progress on the president's five major management initiatives: performance improvement, commercial services management (formerly known as competitive sourcing), e-government, human capital and financial performance.

Overall, the final assessment showed mixed results. The majority of agencies achieved greens and yellows in most categories. But a smattering of red, or "unsatisfactory," marks remained, particularly in the e-government and financial performance categories.

Nevertheless, a comparison of the first and last management agenda score cards shows dramatic improvement. The first evaluation contained red lights almost across the board, with a few yellows and only one green. On the most recent assessment, four agencies earned greens in all five categories, with the State Department improving in two categories to a uniformly successful rating.

OMB also released the fiscal 2008 improper payments report, which showed a 1.1 percent increase in the error rate from fiscal 2007. The rise in errors, which amounts to $30 million, was driven largely by 12 programs that were measured for the first time in 2008. The newcomers included large high-risk programs such as Medicaid, Medicare Part C, and the State Children's Health Insurance Program; they had improper payments of$28.9 billion, with an error rate of 10.3 percent, OMB officials said.

"From a transparency standpoint we find this to be a positive development in terms of providing that full picture of where we need to go," said one OMB official, who spoke on background because of his career status.

Finally, OMB released the first-ever Performance Report of the Federal Government, a compilation of two-page performance snapshots collected from 24 major agencies. While the agency reports offer only a surface-level account, the goal was to provide basic information in a more user-friendly, digestible format, said Clay Johnson, OMB deputy director for management.

Comparing the slim 55-page report to a massive stack of individual agency performance reports, Johnson said it was important to give taxpayers, federal employees and other stakeholders something accessible and unintimidating.

"Instead of just producing 300 to 400 page reports, for the first time, each major federal agency has summarized its budget, financial and performance results in two pages," Johnson said. "Citizens should expect their federal government to spend their taxpayer dollars effectively and more effectively each year, and this way they can see it more clearly."

On his way out the door with the rest of the Bush political appointees, Johnson said he was proud of the state in which the Bush administration has left the management initiatives, and he expressed confidence that the next team would continue the effort to make agencies more transparent, accountable and results-oriented.

"It sounds like the kinds of things that have been going on in the federal government in recent years will continue to go on, and I bet at an accelerated rate," Johnson said. "One of the things I think the next administration will inherit is more transparency about what works and what doesn't in federal government than has ever existed before, so [they have] the information they need."