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Tuesday, September 25, 2007
A Correction and an Explanation
We were contacted over the weekend by the Administration on Aging (AoA) in response to my posting last Thursday about the newly released round of PART scores. Saadia Greenberg, Director of the Office of Evaluation at the AoA correctly points out that I was in error when I said it was strange OMB cited the AoA during this release of new scores because it was evaluated by the PART in 2003. In fact, the AoA was reassessed this year (2007) and you can see the results of the reassessment. I apologize for the error. Now I certainly don't want to pass the buck here, but this mistake wasn't really my fault. If you put "Administration on Aging" into the search engine on the ExpectMore.gov website, all you get is information on the program's evaluation from 2003, not 2007. See the screen capture I took this morning:
This brings up two important points about the PART:
1) It's still unclear (at least to me) how the reassessment process works.Why are programs reassessed? Is it based on the program's rating? Was the AoA scheduled to be assessed again in 2007, or did agency program staff have to request the reassessment? Do they start over from scratch or simply build on the old assessment, revisiting areas the program staff or OMB staff want to have reviewed?
2) Second (and I alluded to this last week on the BudgetBlog), it is difficult, if not impossible, for users to see which programs have been recently reassessed and which programs have been reviewed for the first time. I heard from OMB last week that this round of scores included 40 programs that were reviewed for the first time and 75 reassessments of program. Yet there is no groupings of these programs provided on ExpectMore.gov and no way to search to pull them out in a list (the assessment year also isn't included in the downloadable spreadsheet with all PART scores). ExpectMore.gov doesn't even show the year any particular program was reviewed on the summary page for that program. You have to get over to the "assessment details" page to see that - and even when you are there, the information is not always reliable (as I learned the hard way last week).
Now in the great scheme of access to information and transparency issues within the current administration, I fully admit this issue ranks way down at the bottom of the list. But since OMB has invested a significant amount of time in continuing to make PART information and the PART process more transparent through ExpectMore.gov, I'm sure they would be interesting in continuing to improve the website.
In that spirit, it would be great for people to be able to track programs as they move through the PART process the first time and then again when they get reassessed, including information about why the program was reassessed and all past information gathered through the PART process (old reviews, reports, and data). This will help people interested in this data to understand how programs move through the review process, give more information about exactly what happened to change the rating for the program and the context under which the review was held, and allow comparison between PART reviews for the same program over time. I hope these upgrades can be added. Because of the good work OMB has done to improve the ExpectMore.gov website for users, I would expect nothing less.
Posted by Adam Hughes
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