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Thursday, February 08, 2007
PART: Still Just Blowing Smoke
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More evidence today that the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) is really not used to inform the president's budgeting decisions. Ryan Grim reports for The Politico newspaper that President Bush requested a 31 percent increase in funding for the Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign, a program within the White House Office of Drug Control Policy that runs advertisements to encourage kids not to take drugs.
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The story cites an extensive study reviewed by the Government Accountability Office that found the program was ineffective at reducing youth drug use. Interestingly enough, the president's own PART review also found the program lacking - giving it a paltry 6 percent score for the results/accountability section of the during its 2003 review.
In 2006, the PART "improvement plan" stated, "This improvement will be completed pending the receipt of the GAO Report assessing the Media Campaign evaluation." Well, the report was delivered in August and there isn't much evidence the administration is taking the research to heart. The GAO report concluded:
Given that [the] evaluation stated the campaign did not reduce youth drug use nationally, Congress should consider limiting appropriations for the campaign, beginning in the 2007 fiscal year budget until ONDCP provides credible evidence of a media campaign approach that effectively prevents and curtails youth drug use. (emphasis added)
Now I don't know whether this program is a good one or not - just because the PART says it doesn't get results does not mean it should be de-funded. But Grim's story contains a facinating insight into how research and performance data inform the Bush administration's budgeting decisions:
The bad [GAO] study results weren't news to the White House, which sat on the research for a year and a half while continuing to fund the ad campaign on the basis that the study was still ongoing, Slate magazine reported in September. In October, National Journal reported that John Carnevale, former director of budget and planning for the drug czar's office, admitted that the office "did not like the report's conclusions and chose to sit on it."
So, if PART supports the administration's goals already, they follow it. If it doesn't support their goals, they, ahhh...sit on it.
Posted by Adam Hughes
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