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Greater Effectiveness (Comments from Clay Johnson, Deputy Director for Management)

Federal agencies have significantly greater ability to be effective today than they did in 2001, when they began working on the President's Management Agenda. The green (and yellow) on the PMA scorecard shows all the agencies that have developed the ability to maximize the value of their people, responsibly account for the people's money, improve service delivery, and manage costs and investments.

But having the ability to be effective is not enough. The President has congratulated agency leadership on developing these enhanced management capabilities, but charged them to make sure the government works better as a result, over the next few years and beyond.

So how do we do this?

  • We continue to develop the desired management abilities.
  • We make sure each program has clear goals, an aggressive performance improvement plan and clear accountability for results, and that leadership makes it clear that improved performance is expected.
  • We focus even more on the GAO high risk items, more clearly identifying the improvement goals, the plans for getting there, and where we are ahead or behind schedule.
  • We better educate the Congressional committee members who don't yet understand the value of these efforts for their constituents.

And to ensure these enhanced management capabilities impact government effectiveness beyond the next two years:

  • In the fall of 2008, every agency clearly and publicly defines its management and program performance goals for the benefit of its employees, Congress, interest groups, the press, and the next Administration.
  • We create a Performance Management Council to strengthen the performance management community as the CFO, CIO, CHCO, and CAO communities are served by their councils.
  • We strengthen and duplicate our performance reporting to make our budget proposals more purposeful and to improve accountability for performance.

In general we have to ensure all our hard-earned "greens" makes it possible for us to show where and how program performance has improved over the previous year, for FY08 and every year thereafter.