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Thursday, November 15, 2007
Bush Attempts To Secure His Legacy
The Bush administration is up to some of its old tricks this week. After the Washington Post reported at the end of October of a movement within the administration to implement as much policy as possible through administrative functions rather than convincing Congress to adopt its policies, we are beginning to see some specific instances of their plan. In September, the White House issued new principles for agencies in conducting risk analysis that could impact agencies ability to protect the public. Then on Tuesday this week, Bush signed a new executive order (EO #13450) that attempts to "improve government program performance." Sounds like a good thing, no? let's look a bit deeper.
The executive order looks like a pretty thinly-veiled attempt to integrate the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) process into more aspects of the agencies' management and budgeting mechanisms. It has a number of vague references to "objective performance information" and "objectively measurably outcomes." Unfortunately, it gives no details on what would suffice to measure programs. Ah ha! Lucky that OMB has instituted the PART, which it claims is an unbiased evaluator of federal programs (read our take why PART is anything but what OMB claims). With this EO, now OMB will have a PART Point Person (PPP) at each agency to continue to push to make PART information, poor as it is, the be all and end all of agency performance evaluation.
There are other problems with the approach outlined in the EO as well. By creating "Performance Improvement Officers" at each agency who are supposed to support OMB in implementing more stringent performance measurement and evaluation across the government, the executive order expands the ability of OMB to hand down political and policy pronouncements directly to agency staff responsible for running programs. Forget about having to get a busy agency head to enforce new OMB policies and procedures in running federal programs. OMB can just cut straight to the "Performance Improvement Officer," who can use their power and position as the evaluator of programs to force agency staff to run those programs in a particular way (ok, so they can't literally force them to do make changes, but they can make it very difficult not to). Don't like the way an agency is running a particular program? Tell the Performance Improvement Officer to let it be known that a program operated in such a way will receive poor marks on their next performance evaluation (I mean, their next PART rating). Upset about a congressionally mandated policy? Tell agencies they will be marked down in their performance evaluations for following it. What's more, by housing these folks at the agencies and not at OMB, it will help to make it appear that their evaluations are not tarnish by political biases.
Now if OMB and agencies were actually going to use varied sources of objective performance information and evaluation, combining outside experts, program stake holders, analyses from government bodies such as GAO, CRS, CBO, NAS, etc., agency program staff, congressional committees, and the host of other players who have different expertise and experience with specific government programs, this EO might not be that bad. We certainly wouldn't mind a bit more attention being paid to areas of wasteful spending in the government (also see here, here, and here too), and bringing increased accountability where there hasn't been enough. Unfortunately, this administration is unlikely to do that. Scratch that. They are not going to do that. Instead, this EO attempts to entrench the PART as the government's (and perhaps everyone else's) sole evaluator of whether government programs are working.
For more information, see this good summary of the EO from Public Citizen.
Posted by Adam Hughes
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