In one of the year's most peculiar moments, the Innovations in American Government Award has been awarded to the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART). The PART was among over 1,000 applicants considered for the award, given each year by the Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard's Kenney School of Government and the Council for Excellence in Government.

That PART was awarded an innovation in government award is ironic in that the ideas and goals underlying PART are certainly nothing new. The issue of government performance has been around since shortly after World War II. Past attempts to reform the management of government programs range from the 1949 recommendations of the Hoover commission to the Carter administration’s Zero Based Budgeting experiment to the Nixon Administration’s Management By Objectives initiative and the Johnson Administration’s Planning-Programming-Budgeting System. Even President Clinton jumped on the bandwagon with his Reinventing Government initiative. Most of these initiatives were short-lived and with any luck, so to will the PART.

Further, PART has been criticized as having severe deficiencies including ideological and political bias and inconsistency in implementation across programs. The most egregious of the criticisms is that often times its one-size-fits-all approach actually forces programs to be evaluated tangentially or contrary to their stated purpose(s).

The PART is hardly innovative and certainly not worth of praise. This is yet another step in the disasterous process of PART gaining wide and unquestioned acceptance - a step that surely will lead to fewer protections and supports for the American people.

The Government Accountability Office released a updated response to the Senate Finance Committee after an April hearing on the tax gap. The report released by GAO concerns the Internal Revenue Services' strategic approach to reducing the tax gap.

The most recent IRS calculations put the tax gap - or the difference between how much should be paid in taxes and how much actually is - betwen $312 and $353 billion per year. The majority of this comes from underreporting of taxes owed by individuals and corporations. Interestingly enough, the current projections for the FY05 budget deficit fall smack in the middle of that range, at $331 billion. While there are many more problems with growing and persistent long-term budget deficits than closing the tax gap could fix, it is nonetheless an important problem needing to be addressed by Congress and the IRS.