<DOC>
[108th Congress House Hearings]
[From the U.S. Government Printing Office via GPO Access]
[DOCID: f:93722.wais]
SHOULD WE PART WAYS WITH GPRA: A LOOK AT PERFORMANCE BUDGETING AND
PROGRAM REVIEW
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
SUBCOMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY
AND FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT
of the
COMMITTEE ON
GOVERNMENT REFORM
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED EIGHTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
FEBRUARY 4, 2004
__________
Serial No. 108-144
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Government Reform
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.gpo.gov/congress/house
http://www.house.gov/reform
U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
93-722 WASHINGTON : 2004
_____________________________________________________________________
For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing
Office Internet: bookstore.gpo.gov Phone: toll free (866) 512-1800
Fax: (202) 512-2250 Mail: Stop SSOP, Washington, DC 20402-0001
COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM
TOM DAVIS, Virginia, Chairman
DAN BURTON, Indiana HENRY A. WAXMAN, California
CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut TOM LANTOS, California
ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida MAJOR R. OWENS, New York
JOHN M. McHUGH, New York EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York
JOHN L. MICA, Florida PAUL E. KANJORSKI, Pennsylvania
MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York
STEVEN C. LaTOURETTE, Ohio ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland
DOUG OSE, California DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio
RON LEWIS, Kentucky DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois
JO ANN DAVIS, Virginia JOHN F. TIERNEY, Massachusetts
TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri
CHRIS CANNON, Utah DIANE E. WATSON, California
ADAM H. PUTNAM, Florida STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts
EDWARD L. SCHROCK, Virginia CHRIS VAN HOLLEN, Maryland
JOHN J. DUNCAN, Jr., Tennessee LINDA T. SANCHEZ, California
NATHAN DEAL, Georgia C.A. ``DUTCH'' RUPPERSBERGER,
CANDICE S. MILLER, Michigan Maryland
TIM MURPHY, Pennsylvania ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of
MICHAEL R. TURNER, Ohio Columbia
JOHN R. CARTER, Texas JIM COOPER, Tennessee
MARSHA BLACKBURN, Tennessee ------ ------
------ ------ ------
------ ------ BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont
(Independent)
Melissa Wojciak, Staff Director
David Marin, Deputy Staff Director
Rob Borden, Parliamentarian
Teresa Austin, Chief Clerk
Phil Barnett, Minority Chief of Staff/Chief Counsel
Subcommittee on Government Efficiency and Financial Management
TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania, Chairman
MARSHA BLACKBURN, Tennessee EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York
STEVEN C. LaTOURETTE, Ohio PAUL E. KANJORSKI, Pennsylvania
CANDICE S. MILLER, Michigan MAJOR R. OWENS, New York
MICHAEL R. TURNER, Ohio CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York
------ ------
Ex Officio
TOM DAVIS, Virginia HENRY A. WAXMAN, California
Mike Hettinger, Staff Director
Larry Brady, Professional Staff Member
Sara D'Orsie, Clerk
Mark Stephenson, Minority Professional Staff Member
C O N T E N T S
----------
Page
Hearing held on February 4, 2004................................. 1
Statement of:
Breul, Jonathan D., senior fellow, IBM Center for the
Business of Government..................................... 28
McTigue, Maurice P., Q.S.O., distinguished visiting scholar,
Mercatus Center at George Mason University................. 35
Posner, Paul L., Managing Director, Federal Budget Issues,
Strategic Issues........................................... 6
Letters, statements, etc., submitted for the record by:
Breul, Jonathan D., senior fellow, IBM Center for the
Business of Government, prepared statement of.............. 30
Maloney, Hon. Carolyn B., a Representative in Congress from
the State of New York, prepared statement of............... 55
McTigue, Maurice P., Q.S.O., distinguished visiting scholar,
Mercatus Center at George Mason University, prepared
statement of............................................... 38
Platts, Hon. Todd Russell, a Representative in Congress from
the State of Pennsylvania, prepared statement of........... 3
Posner, Paul L., Managing Director, Federal Budget Issues,
Strategic Issues, prepared statement of.................... 10
SHOULD WE PART WAYS WITH GPRA: A LOOK AT PERFORMANCE BUDGETING AND
PROGRAM REVIEW
----------
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 2004
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on Government Efficiency and Financial
Management,
Committee on Government Reform,
Washington, DC.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 2 p.m., in
room 2247, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Todd Russell
Platts (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
Present: Representatives Platts, Blackburn, Towns, and
Maloney.
Staff present: Mike Hettinger, staff director; Dan Daly,
counsel; Larry Brady and Tabetha Mueller, professional staff
members; Amy Laudeman, legislative assistant; Sarah D'Orsie,
clerk; Mark Stephenson and Adam Bordes, minority professional
staff members; and Jean Gosa, minority assistant clerk.
Mr. Platts. A quorum being present, this hearing of the
Subcommittee on Government Efficiency and Financial Management
will come to order. I appreciate everyone's attendance here
today.
Congress enacted the Government Performance and Results Act
[GPRA], more than a decade ago to create an effective,
efficient government that produced tangible results, results
that would form the basis for budgetary decisions. GPRA was
intended to serve as a firm foundation on which to build a
structure of performance management.
While GPRA was passed in 1993, it did not take effect in
practice until the fiscal year 1999. Consequently, we currently
have about 4 years of information on which to judge the act's
effectiveness. GPRA continues to evolve as senior agency
leaders better understand the requirements set forth in the act
and are given the tools for its effective implementation.
We are seeing progress, however. Agencies' strategic plans
are becoming more useful. Agencies are becoming more
comfortable and more competent at managing for outcomes, and
agencies are now beginning to scratch the surface of linking
performance to budget decisions. Needless to say, however, we
still have a long way to go. Efforts to improve government
effectiveness beginning with the Hoover Commission failed to
achieve the important objective of linking performance to
budgeting decisions.
President George Bush's management agenda is the most
aggressive attempt by any administration to successfully
achieve this goal, and as I've said before, I certainly commend
President Bush and his administration for embracing this
challenge and really sticking with it over, now, 3 years.
The administration's Program Assessment Rating Tool [PART],
implemented for the first time last year, seeks to tie funding
sources to outcomes at the program level. PART is a key tool
not only in the President's management agenda, but also as part
of the broader performance-based accountability effort
encompassed by GPRA.
GPRA and the President's management agenda are mutually
dependent efforts which cannot fully succeed in the absence of
the other. In other words, the program-by-program reviews
demanded under PART and the broader strategic planning approach
emphasized under GPRA are both equally important.
With the 5-year phase-in of PART across all Federal
Government programs well under way, Congress and the
administration need to work together to ensure that the
information gleaned from the PART reviews empowers executive
and legislative leaders to make timely, well-informed and
sometimes difficult programmatic decisions on behalf of the
American public.
Today we will hear from a panel of experts in the field of
performance budgeting. Mr. Paul Posner, Director of Strategic
Issues for the General Accounting Office and the author of the
report released last week; Mr. Jonathan Breul, a senior fellow
at the IBM Center for the Business of Government; and the
Honorable Maurice McTigue, the director of the government
accountability project at George Mason University's Mercatus
Center.
I certainly want to thank each of you for being with us
today and also for your work with the staff of the committee in
preparing for this hearing and the wealth of knowledge you've
shared with all of us. I look forward to each of your
testimonies.
And I'm now pleased to yield to the gentleman from New
York, Mr. Towns, our ranking member, for the purpose of making
an opening statement.
[The prepared statement of Hon. Todd Russell Platts
follows:]
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 93722.001
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 93722.002
Mr. Towns. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, for holding
this hearing.
At its most basic level, performance budgeting requires
linking agency performance information with budgetary
decisions. When done correctly, performance budgeting allows
resources to be allocated according to an agency's stated goals
and its results in meeting those goals. Unfortunately, various
attempts at performance-based budgeting for the past five
decades have produced, at best, mixed results in providing a
better blueprint for aligning government spending with results.
As the subcommittee prepares to hear from GAO on their
recent assessments of the PART program, I remain skeptical that
the administration's efforts to integrate performance
information for budgetary decisions will be successful. As in
the 2004 budget, the PART was used to review about 20 percent
of all Federal programs for the 2005 budget with the goal of
reviewing all Federal programs by 2008.
As I've stated over and over again and, of course, also in
many hearings, successful management initiatives require a
sustained and concerted effort, along with mutual cooperation
and understanding, between OMB and the Federal agencies.
Furthermore, we must ensure that political ideology does not
adversely impact the production of reliable and credible
information or jeopardize the confidence of all stakeholders in
the results.
While I recognize that PART is a tool for the executive
branch to better analyze Federal programs and outcomes, it must
be used in concert with other performance-based assessments in
order to be useful to others in both the agency and
congressional arenas.
As we enter into our second budget cycle and a new round
agency reviews, I remain concerned that PART is usurping the
statutory goals and objectives, and of course, I think that is
to be a concern of all of us.
Furthermore, the subjective nature of PART seems to
negatively impact the amount of reliable data it provides due
to chronic disagreement between OMB agency officials on long-
term performance measures of unreasonable thresholds in
satisfying PART standards.
While I am hopeful the 2005 program reviews were most--were
more successful, I remain wary that the subjective nature of
PART will limit both the quantity and quality of information.
I look forward to hearing from today's witnesses on the
results of the GAO's study of PART as the committee seeks out
additional methods for improving its usefulness in the budget
process.
So, on that note, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
Mr. Platts. Thank you, Mr. Towns.
If I can now ask our witnesses to come forward and remain
standing to have the oath administered to you, and also any
other individuals who will be advising you as part of your
testimony, if they will stand as part of taking the oath.
If you could all raise your right hands.
[Witnesses sworn.]
Mr. Platts. Thank you, and the clerk will note that all
witnesses affirmed the oath. We certainly do appreciate the
substantive written testimonies that you've provided and would
ask if you're able to try and summarize those written
testimonies in roughly 5 to 7 minutes before we get into
questions and answers.
For everyone's knowledge, we believe we have until about 3
p.m. before the first round of votes on the floor may occur;
and so we'll try to get through our opening statements and get
into the Q and A as best possible, and we'll see where we are
as to how the schedule will proceed once votes start on the
floor.
We're going to start, Mr. Posner, with you; and with each
witness, I'd just like to share for everyone's knowledge a
little bit of each witness' background.
Paul Posner was named in 1996 as Director of Strategic
Issues for the General Accounting Office, a position he still
holds today. Before this position, he was Assistant Director of
the Intergovernmental Relations Group, Associate Director for
Tax Policy and Administration and prior to that, Director of
the Federal Program Review for the New York City Budget Bureau.
Mr. Posner, thank you again for being here, and if you'd
like to proceed with your testimony.
STATEMENT OF PAUL L. POSNER, MANAGING DIRECTOR, FEDERAL BUDGET
ISSUES, STRATEGIC ISSUES
Mr. Posner. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'm pleased to be here
today to discuss our work that we did for you and Congressman
Tiahrt and Senators Voinovich and Brownback that resulted in
the issuance of our report on January 30th.
Since the 1950's, the Federal Government, as has been
noted, has attempted several governmentwide initiatives to
better align spending decisions with performance, what we call
performance budgeting. PART is the latest initiative in a
longstanding series undertaken to improve the link between
performance and information in the budget process.
GPRA, unlike many of its predecessors, has actually been a
reform that has been sustained since its passage 10 years ago,
and evidence strongly indicates that it's become more relevant
than its predecessors.
PART offers the potential to build on the infrastructure of
performance plans and information ushered in by GPRA. In a
historical sense, GPRA has succeeded in improving the supply of
plans and information and measures; and we actually have a
study forthcoming assessing the 10-year record of that.
PART in some ways marks a new chapter in performance-based
budgeting by focusing more explicitly on the demand side of the
equation; that is, promoting the use of the information
generated through GPRA's processes and other processes to more
directly feed into executive branch budget decisions.
Let me just briefly summarize the findings of our report.
First, PART clearly helped structure OMB's use of performance
information for its internal budget analysis. It succeeded in
making the use of this information more transparent than before
and stimulated agencies' interest in budget and performance
integration.
Moreover, it illustrated the potential to build on GPRA's
foundation to more actively promote the use of performance in
budget decisions. OMB should be credited with opening up for
scrutiny and potential criticism its review of key areas of
Federal program performance and making its assessments
available on the Web site and other vehicles.
Much of the potential value of PART lies not just in the
funding recommendations but in the related program and
management improvements. Although funding recommendations were
related to PART recommendations, they were not linked in a
mechanical and formulaic manner, nor should they be.
Now it will be important for OMB to get on with the job of
the agencies of following through on the daunting series of
program analyses, recommendations and improvements that they've
surfaced. As is to be expected in the first year of any reform,
the first several years for that matter, PART is a work in
progress, and we noted in our report areas where OMB can make
improvements. Any tool that is sophisticated enough to take
into account the complexity of the U.S. Government ultimately
requires the exercise of judgment by users. Therefore, it's not
surprising that we found some inconsistencies by OMB's staff in
interpreting and applying this tool.
The rating tool is a useful diagnostic instrument to
address strengths and weaknesses, but it can be difficult to
capture the effectiveness of complex programs in dichotomous
yes-no answers or in a single rating number.
Unlike a private business, government does not have a
single bottom line nor do many of it programs. This doesn't
mean that we shouldn't try to more systematically judge
performance, but that we must recognize the multiple goals and
dimensions when we do.
PART provides an opportunity to more efficiently focus
scarce analytic resources, to focus decisionmakers' attention
on the most pressing policy issues and to consider comparisons
and tradeoffs among related programs. At this point, we think
that opportunity largely has not been addressed, that OMB
remains committed to increasing the coverage up to 100 percent
of all programs over the next several years. We think there are
opportunities to more strategically use PART to focus on
related groups of programs achieving common objectives.
The first year of PART's assessment also underscored
longstanding gaps in performance evaluation efforts through the
Federal Government. One hope is that PART could possibly prompt
greater attention to those gaps.
The relationship between PART and the broader GPRA planning
process is still evolving. Although PART can stimulate
discussion on program-specific measurement issues, it is not a
substitute for GPRA's strategic, longer-term focus on thematic
goals.
Although PART and GPRA serve different needs, a strategy
for integrating the two could help strengthen both. The two
should not be viewed as supplanting one another, but as
complementing one another.
PART really illustrates the new challenges and tensions
prompted by the integration of performance in budgeting. It
raises fundamental questions like whose interest should drive
the integration and what frameworks and perspectives should
drive it; ultimately, a combination of the best of both
planning and budgeting, married in a synergistic way to promote
better outcomes all around.
While PART clearly serves the needs of OMB and the
President in budget formulation, questions still remain about
whether it serves the needs of other key stakeholders. If the
President or OMB wants the PART to be considered in the
congressional debate, it will be important for OMB to involve
congressional stakeholders early in providing input on
selecting programs, clarifying any significant limitations in
the assessments; open up more about the kinds of issues
addressed in those assessments; and initiate discussions with
congressional committees about how they can best take advantage
and leverage PART in authorization appropriations and
oversight.
Moreover, Congress needs to consider ways it can articulate
its oversight priorities and agenda in a more systematic way.
We made a number of recommendations in our report for OMB.
I'll just briefly outline them.
We've suggested enhanced guidance to improve definitions,
better monitoring of recommendations and followup, and
targeting the OMB reviews in a more strategic way. We've
actually suggested reconsidering the goal of 100 percent and,
instead, talked about a more strategic approach to target
assessments on cirtical program and review related groups of
programs on the tax expenditure side, as well as the spending
side in the same year, there are things that need to be
considered.
As I've indicated, there is also a need to clarify the
relationship between PART and GPRA. Improving the integration
of these separate processes can help promote a more strategic
focus for the PART assessments, and the GPRA planning goals
could be used to anchor the selection and review of programs,
both working toward common objectives.
And finally, we suggested early on involvement of Congress
and buy-in by the Congress itself and the various committees,
because the impact of PART is not just on the President's
decision, but ultimately Congress is going to need to be a
partner in this if we want decisionmaking in the budget process
to really be framed by this new initiative. We have recommended
that OMB seek an early and meaningful dialog in that respect.
Ultimately, PART raises the stakes for performance
management. It holds much promise, but many risks. Budgeting is
properly a political process where there are competing values
and priorities. So, too, and equally contentious, are the
decisions about how to frame the questions, which units to
review, how to choose the focus of your budget decisions, how
to choose your measures and goals. These are all issues where
reasonable people can and should disagree, and as the stakes
grow, potentially greater conflict can be expected. So much is
at stake in the development of this process, our system of
government with separation of powers, PART inevitably needs to
become a more collaborative process among the branches to
become sustained.
This really is an opportune time for the executive and the
Congress to carefully consider how both the agencies and
committees can best take advantage and leverage the new
perspectives coming from this reform agenda. In particular,
PART could become a very useful tool for reexamining the base,
which will become apparent as we go forward and address our
fiscal problems in the Nation.
The norm should be to reconsider the relevance or fit of
any program in today's world for the future. The idea is, we
need to start putting things on the table that heretofore have
been accepted as part of the budget process without being
examined.
What's important is not the specific approach but rather
the intended result of helping Congress better promote improved
performance through broad and comprehensive oversight and
deliberation.
That concludes my statement.
Mr. Platts. Thank you, Mr. Posner.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Posner follows:]
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 93722.003
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 93722.004
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 93722.005
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 93722.006
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 93722.007
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 93722.008
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 93722.009
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 93722.010
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 93722.011
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 93722.012
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 93722.013
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 93722.014
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 93722.015
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 93722.016
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 93722.017
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 93722.018
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 93722.019
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 93722.020
Mr. Platts. Next up is Mr. Jonathan Breul, who is a senior
fellow and associate partner at IBM Consulting Services. Mr.
Breul was formally a Senior Adviser to the Deputy Director for
Management in the Office of Management and Budget. Mr. Breul
also helped develop the President's management agenda, led the
development in governmentwide implementation of GPRA and helped
Senator John Glenn launch the Chief Financial Officers [CFO]
Act.
Mr. Breul, we again thank you for being here, and the floor
is yours.
STATEMENT OF JONATHAN D. BREUL, SENIOR FELLOW, IBM CENTER FOR
THE BUSINESS OF GOVERNMENT
Mr. Breul. Thank you and good afternoon, Mr. Chairman and
members of the subcommittee. Thank you for inviting me to
testify on the topic of performance budgeting and the Office of
Management and Budget's Program Assessment Rating Tool [PART].
Over the past decade, the Congress and several
administrations have put in place a statutory framework for
increasing the use of performance information. The attention of
the Federal Government to strategic planning and the supply of
performance information has increased substantially in the last
10 years since the passage of GPRA.
GPRA is doing exactly what was expected. It has laid the
foundation for use of performance information, and as a
consequence, the Federal Government has never been in a better
position to make its budget decisions more informed by
consideration of performance.
As you indicated, good government advocates have called for
performance budgeting for decades. First championed by the
Hoover Commission in 1949, a Federal performance budget was
intended to shift the focus away from inputs of government to
its functions, activities, costs, and accomplishments.
According to an October 2003 report of the IBM Center for
the Business of Government, there's ample opportunity to use
performance information at each stage of the budget process:
not only in the Office of Management and Budget, but with the
Congress, in the agencies, and with the audit community.
Budget reviews have always involved some discussion of
program performance. In the past, however, such discussions
have not always been conducted in a rigorous, systematic, or
transparent fashion. The Bush administration, however, has made
linking resources to results one of the top five priorities of
the President's management agenda, and OMB is using the PART to
explicitly fuse performance information to the budget at a
funding decision level.
Importantly, the PART analysis enriches budget analysis but
does not replace it. The relationship between a PART rating and
the budget is not a rigid calculation. Lower ratings do not
automatically translate into less funding for a program, just
as higher ratings do not automatically translate into higher
funding.
The GAO report has documented two important actions that
move the departments and agencies into performance budgeting.
First, the PART renders a judgment whether programs are
effective by systematically and transparently assessing program
management and the actual results--in other words, what's
happened.
Second, the PART enables decisionmakers to attach budgetary
and management consequence to those judgments, particularly to
programs that cannot demonstrate that they are effective.
This linking of management and budgetary decisions to
program performance was exactly a purpose of GPRA. Past
initiatives such as President Johnson's Planning, Programming
and Budgeting System [PPBS], tended to devise unique structures
to capture performance information. These unique structures
ultimately proved difficult to link to congressional
decisionmaking and congressional budget justifications and
caused their efforts to fail. GPRA, on the other hand, requires
agencies to plan and measure performance using the same
structures which form the basis for the agency's budget
requests, namely program activities.
The PART instrument and the entire endeavor of budgeting
results are still very much a work in progress. It is far from
perfect, but the PART remains an important step in changing the
way Federal managers think about their responsibilities. It
places the burden of proving effectiveness squarely on their
shoulders.
With further improvement in use, it will provide incentives
for Federal agencies to make their programs more effective. It
can provide meaningful evidence to the Congress and other
decisionmakers to help them inform funding decisions and to
identify flaws in underlying statutes that undermine
effectiveness.
To make further progress, agencies must prepare the way for
performance budgets with their appropriators and other
congressional contacts. A number of steps are recommended. One
is that they need to better understand both their use and the
congressional use of performance information; second, agencies
should consult their appropriators about the outline and sample
justifications; and third, agencies should assure their
appropriators that all of the information and all of the tables
that the appropriators will be using will be included in the
budget justifications and show them where that information can
be found.
The use of performance information should not be instead of
the other information; it should be in addition to enrich that
debate.
Finally, and in conclusion, performance budgeting is the
next logical step in the implementation of results-oriented
government. It will not be the answer to the vexing resource
tradeoffs involving political choice. It does, however, promise
to modify and inform policy decisions and resource allocation
by shifting the focus of debates from inputs to outcomes and
results. Technology-enabled performance budgeting tools also
now available to support agency decisionmakers and make the
development and presentation of the budget all the more easy.
Pursuing a systematic use of strategic and performance
planning, budgeting and financial information is essential to
achieving a more results-oriented and accountable Federal
Government. Thank you.
Mr. Platts. Thank you, Mr. Breul.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Breul follows:]
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 93722.021
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 93722.022
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 93722.023
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 93722.024
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 93722.025
Mr. Platts. And before we go to our next witness, I'd like
to recognize our vice chair, the gentlelady from Tennessee,
Mrs. Blackburn, has joined us, as well as the gentlelady from
New York, Mrs. Maloney. Thank you both for being with us.
Our next witness, the Honorable Maurice McTigue joined the
Mercatus Center in 1997 as a distinguished visiting scholar
after a career as a member of the New Zealand Parliament,
Cabinet Minister and Ambassador. Prior to Mr. McTigue's arrival
in the United States, he led a successful effort to reconstruct
New Zealand's public sector and its stagnant economy. Today, he
is the director of the government accountability project at the
Mercatus Center.
We appreciate your being with us this year, as you were
last year, and for your continuing work in the area of
government accountability.
STATEMENT OF MAURICE P. McTIGUE, Q.S.O., DISTINGUISHED VISITING
SCHOLAR, MERCATUS CENTER AT GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY
Mr. McTigue. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and thank
you for the opportunity of being here to present in front of
your committee once again. And I thank the other members of the
committee, as well, for their interest in this subject, because
at a time of huge government budgets and huge deficits, then I
think the work that you are instigating here will have
incredible momentum for the Congress and for the American
Governments of the future.
I want to start by taking a slightly holistic view of what
is in progress here. What is in progress is a very fundamental
change in the process of accountability in, say, the American
Government, and that fundamental change is moving from a
measurement of money spent and how money is spent to an
additional component. And that additional component is what
public benefit flowed from the expenditure of those moneys.
For the political process, identification of the public
benefit that flowed from the expenditure of moneys is indeed
the most important part of being in politics, because then it's
possible for elected representatives to be able to see clearly
how they can affect the change that they believe is desirable
for their constituencies.
The foundation of that change in the American Government
was the passage of the Government Performance and Results Act,
and while that required government agencies to produce
strategic plans and identify where they intended to go in the
future, I think the most important part of that act was that it
required them to produce evidence of what benefit flowed from
those particular activities.
In considering issues like this, in my view, it's important
to separate process from principle. The principle at stake here
is being able to identify for the American people what public
benefits are arising from governmental activity. When you look
at the different agencies of government, there are, in
government, always some control agencies and there are delivery
agencies. In the U.S. Government I would identify the control
agencies as the Office of Management and Budget, which controls
resources; the White House, which controls policy; and the
Office of Personnel Management, which controls the capability
of organizations.
When you look at the PART process, the performance
assessment rating tool, I think the most important part of that
scrutiny is to remember that it is a tool. A tool serves a
purpose for you; it is meant to produce a particular result.
There is nothing important about the tool in its own right.
It's what it produces for you that is important.
When you look at what was generated by GPRA, information on
the public benefit that arose from programmatic activity, then
the next question and what I call the next wave of change in
government is, ``What do you do with that information?''
Clearly you need to use that to influence decisions about how
you'll allocate resources and how you'll maximize the public
benefit.
To be able to do that, it's essential for a control agency
like OMB to question whether or not the information produced by
delivery organizations is indeed accurate and clearly portrays
what benefit is flowing from that activity. They have chosen to
design this tool called PART to aid them in that particular
process. It is not an end in its own right. What it does is
help confirm whether or not these activities are effective in
what they do and what quantity or public benefit they produce.
I would like to see that tool or the development of another
tool that would allow the comparison of different activities
that are focused on the same goal, for example, all of those
activities focused on improving literacy, so that you could
then compare which of these tools is going to give us the
maximum return and improve literacy among people, rather than
continuing to fund programs that produce little or no benefit.
That is indeed a benefit forgone by American society if you
don't indeed do that. So taking it wider, in my view, is an
important part of the process as well.
I have heard considerable discussion over the last 18
months about whether or not there need to be amendments to the
legislation that sets this process up. I would very strongly
advise that it is counterproductive to try and codify tools. It
makes a presumption that the tool is already perfect, and that
is not true. There is always the opportunity for improvement.
But what can be codified are the results expected from the
application of a tool. In other words, what are the principles
or the values that you are trying to preserve and expand?
So in looking at whether or not there is an opportunity for
giving guidance by legislation, it might be possible to look at
these things. For example, OMB shall examine the performance
history of programs; it might use different tools from time to
time in that process, but there should be a requirement that it
examines that performance history.
That examination will confirm and quantify the public
benefit resulting from programmatic activity. I think that's
important. If the tool doesn't do that, then I don't think
there's any point in doing it.
It should be required that OMB, when building the budget
will compare the results of programs addressing the same
outcome/public benefit so that you know whether or not you are
getting the maximum in improvements in literacy rather than
funding programs that are currently not achieving what you
expect of them.
Then that you might codify that OMB will release this
information to the public in a timely manner, because I think
that information that comes from an examination like this, if
it's done in private, loses most of its effectiveness. The fact
that it becomes public allows people like yourselves to pick
that information up and question as to why funding is still
being directed to this program where there are clearly programs
that produce superior results.
So in looking at the codification of any of these
processes, I think that my advice would be, move carefully, but
move in the direction of preserving the principles and the
intent of what I see as an evolutionary process and making
certain that the center point in that progress is always what
is happening to the public benefit.
Thank you for the opportunity of being here, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Platts. Thank you, Mr. McTigue.
[The prepared statement of Mr. McTigue follows:]
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 93722.026
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 93722.027
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 93722.028
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 93722.029
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 93722.030
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 93722.031
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 93722.032
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 93722.033
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 93722.034
Mr. Platts. I appreciate again all of your testimonies, and
we'll proceed now to questions. For the most part, we'll try to
stick to each of us having about 5 minutes for the initial
round, and then we'll come back for a second round as time
allows with votes and Members' questions.
I'm going to maybe kick it off with kind of a broad
discussion. All three of you touched on the interaction of GPRA
and PART, and there seems to be some confusion within the
agencies that are implementing PART as to how GPRA and PART
interact with each other.
And the second--I guess whether they are to complement each
other. Has PART kind of just taken over what was GPRA's
statutory requirement.
And then what role OMB is playing in trying to convey the
right message, that these are not in place of the other, but to
complement each other.
So I'd appreciate if each of you could expand on your
assessment of how the agencies are actually embracing both the
GPRA strategic plan approach hand in hand with PART, and if
there's any one agency or department that seems most
problematic with that concept.
Mr. Posner.
Mr. Posner. I think not only are they complementary. It's
fair to say that if GPRA didn't exist to support PART, it would
have had to be invented. In other words, PART really rests on
the GPRA foundation and earlier reform efforts.
Each of these efforts brings some value added to those that
follow. GPRA has a broader planning focus, and as a result, it
focuses on broader program goals and policies. What GPRA has
been challenged to do is to root itself into the day-to-day
decisionmaking process. PART clearly offers the potential to
link that up. The question is, how do you do that while
preserving the kind of unique perspectives that GPRA provides,
that breadth of perspective, the potential cross-cutting focus.
And another important value that GPRA serves, which is the
mandate in the law to involve all stakeholders, including the
Congress in particular. This is very important as we go forward
and think about managing--merging performance in budgeting, to
really focus on whose interest is served. I think in our system
if the result is not perceived to be the result of a consensus
among stakeholders, then I think you threaten to undermine the
sustainability of the information.
The President clearly finds utility from PART, and it's
clearly been useful in providing a lot of good public
information. The question going forward is, can it be
sustained, and that's very much a question of how credible and
supported will it be in the community as well as, of course,
most importantly, here in the Congress.
Mr. Platts. Is GAO--are you seeing, though, that there's a
problem in that theory being embraced by the actual departments
or agencies that are implementing PART hand in hand with GPRA,
or not implementing it hand in hand?
Mr. Posner. What we've seen is the potential for a problem
at this point. We've seen guidance from OMB that encourages
agencies to adopt following PART review, PART measures and
incorporate them in the GPRA plans, which is appropriate
potentially. But what we're hearing from agencies is the
guidance suggests replacing the GPRA measures with the PART
measures. And, remember, we're dealing with really two
complementary units of analysis that don't have to replace one
another.
The concern is that seems to be--at least the message that
is coming across and that's prompted a lot of concern fueled in
part by the A-11 guidance--is that the annual performance plans
are going to be subsumed in a performance budget. This could
potentially be useful as long as the substance of the annual
plans are preserved, which goes back to the measures and goals
that are settled on in the planning process.
Again, it raises the concern that there's a narrowing of
the process to focus more on the decision frames and measures
that are useful to OMB and not necessarily those that are
useful to other stakeholders in the process.
So at this point there is a potential. We've set a marker
out that we can all watch. We have not seen the 1995--fiscal
1995 plans or the performance budgets yet, and so it remains to
be seen how that is actually played out.
Mr. Platts. Mr. Breul and Mr. McTigue, if you would like to
comment.
Mr. Breul. I have a bit more optimism than Mr. Posner. The
PART and even GPRA at this point are still on a shakedown
cruise. These are still new, the PART in particular. Agencies
are having--a challenge with the burden of proof shifted to
them to prove the program's worth. In the past there had always
been a presumption that if there wasn't a challenge from
outside or the OMB, that programs did work. The PART has
shifted the burden of proof to the agencies to provide some
proof points that in fact their programs do produce results.
That's been a heavy lift for some of them and a bit of a
challenge.
The use of the PART has also been done in a very clear,
systematic, and rigorous fashion; and the fact that the
administration has been relentless in its pursuit of it, going
20 percent and another 20 percent and intending to push on, I
think has surprised and perhaps disappointed some of the
agencies. They may have thought they could escape.
Finally, the fact that this is having a consequence
attached to it, has made it a serious game and one in which,
again, the agencies are finding out that this matters.
My optimism, though, stems from the fact that--this year
remarkably, it seems to me--almost every agency is going to be
submitting a performance-based budget to the Congress in its
congressional justifications. They aren't just doing so with
OMB in the material they sent last September, but with the
documents that are coming up to the Hill right now are in a
performance-based format.
I went through the Web this morning and I looked at four
agencies in particular--NASA, Transportation, Labor, and
Energy--and remarkably, those congressional justifications are
structured on the strategic goals of GPRA. They lay out the
objectives that are being set to meet them. They describe the
organizations that are going to be deployed to fulfill those
objectives, they describe the programs that have been enacted
by the Congress, and they request resources for those programs.
And they discuss the PART scores that relate to those programs.
Now, that's just four, and I took a quick look this
morning, and I haven't had a chance to read them because
they're heavy documents, but I find that very encouraging. And
to answer some of the concerns, that takes the matter to the
Congress where, of course, there's going to be a dialog. And
there are, of course, going to be differing views, and
adjustments will be made going forward, as they should.
So I'm rather encouraged at this point, and I've got my
fingers crossed that we're going to see more progress.
Mr. McTigue. And the comments that I would make, Mr.
Chairman, are these: That you must always expect that the
process of accountability will be a contest. By definition,
accountability is that process by which we have to expose or
disclose to our peers, those who are entitled to know our
performance. And frankly, when people question that
performance, we're going to react. So the fact that there is
rigor in this process is not something that should be
discouraged. I think that is healthy.
In the final resolution, the agency itself, the delivery
organization, by law, has the power to decide what will go in a
strategic plan; and the activities that are going to achieve
the goals are often laid down by Congress or by policy. And OMB
in its own right can't change those things, but OMB's role is
to decide that we are purchasing from you, Mr. Program Manager,
literacy programs that will lift the level of literacy in this
community or among these people, and we expect to get exactly
that from them: improved literacy. If you cannot demonstrate
that to us, then we're going to say we won't fund you until you
can show us some measures that will indeed justify our
allocating this money.
I think that those are suitable subjects for debate, and
that they should be debated rigorously.
So on one hand, OMB has to be satisfied that it's going to
get what it is purchasing. On the other hand, the organization
has control over its own destiny through both its laws and the
policy under which it works.
Mr. Platts. I want to yield to the ranking member, Mr.
Towns, and my hope--I try to be optimistic and hope that your
reference to the two departments--four agencies that you
mentioned, that's exactly what we'll see happen between GPRA
and PART; because I see them as a wonderful one-two approach of
strategic planning--here are the programs that are meant to
fulfill that plan, and then here's an assessment of how they
are doing. And if they are not successfully fulfilling the
broader plan, we need to look at changes.
As I think we all agree, we are early in the process, and
hopefully, as we go forward, I think the very encouraging
aspect is this administration's steadfast approach to this
issue and its being a priority of the President and his senior
advisers that this is going to be something they're going to
stick with.
So, Mr. Towns.
Mr. Towns. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Let me just
ask either one--if I could get a response from all of you,
really.
Do you care to offer some specifics on the information OMB
can provide to Congress that might be beneficial to both the
authorizers and the appropriators when it comes to the annual
budget process? What can OMB offer?
Mr. Posner. Well, I think, arguably because of PART, the
kind of information that is being offered is substantially more
transparent than before. We have last year--in 2004, a volume
with each--for each program review, 234 programs reviewed last
year. There was a page or two that not only provided the
response, but the rationale for the response for each of the
major question areas in the PART and the kind of
recommendations and followup areas that OMB and the agencies
are going to pursue.
That's a level of information about the results of the OMB
process that we have not seen before. Now it's on CD-ROM,
attached to the budget. So I think we have a lot more
information on the decisions that OMB have made.
The question remains, what's the unit of decisions that
we're being presented? How is the OMB framing the decisions?
And what we are getting are agency-by-agency, kind of very
specific program-by-program evaluations. I think the question
for the Congress is, is OMB or the Congress positioning
themselves to look at related programs together? For example,
low-income housing outcomes cut across the programs, the
agencies, even the tools of government where you have tax
expenditures and other programs. Are we getting reviews that
are organized along those lines to help us see how related
groups of programs are achieving common goals? And so far the
answer to that is ``no.'' And that's not specific just to this
year; that's a chronic problem.
Mr. Breul. I would agree on the question of information.
What you're seeing now is a dramatic revealing of the framework
that is being used to question the agencies, the information
provided and the judgments and analyses that have been rendered
by the OMB officials. It's, in fact, been a traumatic exercise
for most examiners. Those who have been there longer than 2
years are not familiar with having the format of their
questions and the answers that have been arrived at shared with
the public and shared in congressional justifications. They've
never done that in the past.
This has been unprecedented, and as Mr. Posner suggested,
if you look at the budget this year, there's a little envelope
in the back page of the budget document with a CD-ROM that's
got more material than you can look through in an afternoon.
It's complete detail on every program that has been subject to
the PART review, and full of the data, the justifications, and
the rationale for the decisions on how they're ranked. So it's
an impressive body of information that, again, gives everybody
a fair start at arriving at some understanding of what's going
on.
Mr. McTigue. My answer to you would really be an answer
that I would have looked for as a politician myself.
The first thing that I think you can expect to get from
this process is that it will tell you those programs that are
succeeding and at what level they are succeeding. It will tell
you another group of programs where the results are unknown.
They may be succeeding or they may not be succeeding, but at
the moment they're unknown.
One of the encouraging facts is that the number of unknowns
this year has dropped significantly from the previous year. So
the process is having some telling effect on agencies, in that
they are moving out of the unknown category.
The third thing it will tell you is that this program does
not provide any measurable public benefit. That's very valuable
information for the politicians and the political process, to
either say, let's defund that, if it doesn't work; or let's
give them a grace period, at which time they can show they will
perform at the level of the other programs we're currently
funding.
Mr. Towns. Thank you very much. I'm skeptical because
previous attempts at performance-based budgeting have failed
when it came time to either implement programmatic reforms or
budgetary decisions.
Can anyone offer me some perspective as to why PART will be
more effective if it remains specifically as an administration
tool and not incorporated into the budget process?
Mr. Posner. That's an excellent question. I think some of
the previous initiatives, like ZBB and PPB, were kind of
``build a bridge and expect they'll come''; and in fact, the
budget process went along its own historic way, and there was
no effort to reach out and link up to it.
I think what PART--what GPRA started really, was to
recognize that this would not be sustainable if this was not
linked to the process by which we make our annual resource
allocation decisions, and GPRA at least required the plans to
cover all the programs in the budget.
What PART is doing now is taking the base of GPRA and
force-feeding that more into the budget decisionmaking process.
Now, the question you raised I think is the most important
one, which is the budget decisionmaking process is not just the
President's process; it's a congressional process. And the
question is, can a process that's oriented to one actor be
viewed as credible by all the other actors in the system? And
that's absolutely where we are right now. That's the challenge
facing OMB and the Congress.
In our report we suggested that Congress needs to think
more systematically about structuring, planning for oversight
and its priorities to be a more active participant, to join up,
than it has been before.
Mr. Towns. And my time has expired, Mr. Chairman, but I'm
just wondering how the appropriators would react to this.
Anyway, that's another issue.
Mr. Platts. It's on my list to come back to.
The gentlelady from Tennessee, Mrs. Blackburn.
Mrs. Blackburn. Thank you so much. I think we all were
wondering how those appropriators would react. Let me just
follow along with that.
You know, I'm always amazed with these discussions that we
have, that it has taken this long for accountability to be an
issue, and I am always reminded, when we're talking about PART
and GPRA, of a response that was made shortly after I came to
this committee. We had a hearing and someone from an agency,
when I inquired about a time line, said, oh, we don't have a
time line for the project; we have a continuing appropriation.
And how offended I was on behalf of my constituents that they
felt that way, because I do think that effectiveness and
efficiency and accountability are very important.
And I thank each of you for the information pertaining to
that you bring to us.
One question that has come--that I was sitting here
thinking on and kind of following my colleagues' remarks here,
when you're looking at PART and GPRA and you're looking at the
performance-based initiatives and performance-based budgeting,
how beneficial would it be to incorporate a zero-based
budgeting exercise with the agencies as they go through
building this budget if they're going to use PART and access
that data as a ratings tool?
And, Mr. McTigue, as you're talking about their outcomes
and the delivery that they have, the benefits if they went back
to zero; and as we talk about moving the budget process to
something that is an equitable, deliverable for the taxpayers,
if we go back and move away from baseline into more of a zero-
based format.
Mr. Posner? We'll just go straight down the line.
Mr. Posner. I think that conceptually the PART in fact is
very much in line with the zero-based concept, because it
departs from budgeting on the margins. We're not talking about
increments of five or up or down. The PART addresses the whole
program by its roots, and we're saying, how well is it doing,
what kind of administration and cost structure does it have,
and what are we getting for results.
So the conceptual basis of PART supports a more, whether
you call it zero-based or reexamination of the base kind of
process. That's got to be a fundamental part budget process
going forward when we look at the long-term fiscal challenges
we face.
Now, having said that, what we learn--one of the things we
learned from the last zero-based budgeting exercise is, if you
try to do everything, you're going to completely exhaust the
system and it will fall on its own weight. And that's one of
the reasons that we're concerned about the goal for 100 percent
coverage of the PART, and reporting programs on part of new
programs. I think not only does it burden analytic resources at
OMB and the agencies, but frankly, it doesn't focus
decisionmakers as much as they need to be focused.
In other words, if you can think of related groups of
programs like the authorization cycle up here that we are going
to do a sunset review of them and have PART geared to
supporting a congressional reauthorization process, that is the
kinds of thing that might be more targeted and get more
attention.
Mrs. Blackburn. Thank you, sir.
Mr. Breul. The two points that you bring up about looking
at the base have the virtue of ensuring that no program is
going to escape this analysis and that you look at the entire
set of resources being allocated. Both the PART and GPRA are an
invitation to do. They are useful tools to do that. The scores,
for example, were not, a score of just the marginal dollars put
into a program but relate to an entire program's administration
and the set of results that are being achieved.
The workload problem is a serious one and that's indeed why
the administration chose to do 20 percent of the programs a
year. To put every program all at once through such a review
would have just overwhelmed everyone. And that is why I think
there is quite a bit of virtue of moving through on a 20
percent basis to cover all, to make sure that no program
escapes this kind of review, but that you do so in increments
that are manageable.
But the analysis that is coming up now, and the ratings,
are not, as I said, focused on the margin of delta of the
additional budget resources, but look at entire programs. So it
is an invitation for the appropriators to take that analysis
and make their own judgments. Whether they choose to do is what
we will be seeing this season.
Mr. McTigue. In my view, speaking both from a theoretic
point of view and also from practical experience, I think there
is a slightly different way of approaching your problem which I
think is likely to be more successful. If Congress and the
administration were to say to agencies, ``we're going to fund 5
million people moving from illiteracy to literacy this year,''
and then you had a variety of different programs that were
contesting for the pool of money to do that, I think you would
get exactly what you are talking about now, a review on the
basis of which are the most effective mechanisms that we have
to move people from an illiterate state to a literate state.
If you did exactly the same with long-term unemployed
people, ``we are going to fund 5 million long-term unemployed
people back into employable skills and work,'' then you would
look at a range of programs that would be likely to be
effective in doing that and have a contest for the dollars. In
those circumstances, you don't have to have the same rigor
because what you are really doing is you are moving to a
purchase of things of value and away from an allocation of
money. Governments have traditionally allocated moneys to
activities without too much of a focus what we get in return.
To answer one of Mr. Towns' questions from before, the
difference in this process in my view is this: That it focuses
on an outcome that is determined as a public benefit. The
previous procedures have tended to focus on results that might
be you served this number of people; whether you cured their
problems or not was not a factor in the equation. In this
process you are talking about curing the problem at the same
time. If it is about hunger, it is moving people off the lists
of being hungry, it is not just feeding them every day.
I think outcomes are one of the important ingredients and
that outcome is clearly defined as a public benefit, and then
you are able to say to different programs we could not afford
to give away the public benefit of funding you, when somebody
else is getting twice as many people into literate States.
Mrs. Blackburn. Thank you.
Mr. Platts. Thank you, Mrs. Blackburn. Mr. McTigue, in
reading your written testimony, that one sentence that you
reiterated captures the essence of where we are going to hold
recipients of tax dollars accountable for their public benefits
produced, not simply that they can account for where the money
went. I think that is exactly what it is about, and the benefit
that will come from PART being well embraced and implemented.
I recognize the gentlewoman from New York Mrs. Maloney for
the purposes of a question.
Mrs. Maloney. Mr. Chairman, I would like to put my opening
statement in the record.
[The prepared statement of Hon. Carolyn B. Maloney
follows:]
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] 93722.035
Mrs. Maloney. Just not that I was a cosponsor of the
original legislation in the 103d Congress and it was the first
bill that I managed on the floor of Congress, the former
Majority Leader Armey, this was one of his areas, that building
accountability into government was a main focus of his.
I would like to ask the Honorable Maurice McTigue, I am
very, very concerned about not having accountability in the
intelligence of the country. We are talking about programmatic
and we are building in accountability and I support that. But
now we are having all types of secret reviews on what went
wrong with the American intelligence. And I was wondering if we
could have the same type of GPRA goals and framework built into
the intelligence gathering of the country.
And also building in dissent. Say there are five
intelligence communities--I am only repeating what I have read
in the papers, that the CIA said that they told this review
group that there was no weapons of mass destruction, there was
no uranium, etc. But what we are grappling with now and it is
very much on my mind, September 11--I represent New York City
and lost 500 constituents--what we are looking at is how do we
improve our intelligence?
Could we take a GPRA type framework or a PART framework and
build it into a guidelines and framework for better
intelligence gathering that is analyzed, that dissent is more
transparent in the decisionmaking process, if you understand
what I am saying?
Mr. McTigue. I think that really gets to a very significant
issue that moves out from the things that are really easy to
do. Like did you make the right payments to the right people
and did you get people from----
Mrs. Maloney. How many people got off welfare? How many
people got a job? That is easy. But now we are looking at
different ways to make our intelligence better and if we had a
performance based situation it might help us be better in the
future.
Mr. McTigue. My view with regard to all of these things is
first and foremost can you identify the public benefit that you
are seeking to address? And in this field, the public benefit
is risk. Can you diminish the risk to American citizens from
terrorist activity or from other activities? And I think that
what should be required of intelligence agencies is that they
should be much better at risk identification and then measuring
by how much they have diminished that risk. They will tell you
that is impossible but the banking industry and the insurance
industry have done it for as long as they have existed and have
done it reasonably successfully.
That also in my view enables them to be able to deal with
the issue of what of those matters should remain official and
what should it be required to identify in terms of public
knowledge. I would be quite happy if the FBI or the CIA could
say to us that the risk of terrorist incursion into the United
States has diminished by 25 or 35 percent over the last year.
That would make me feel more comfortable, rather than that I
have expended X quantities of dollars and deployed X numbers of
people, but I don't know what that means, whether that means I
am safer or less safe. It is a tough test but I think it is a
test that they should be required to meet.
Mrs. Maloney. Do you think they could do that? In your
experiences did you have other governments that you reviewed
that analyzed risk and required intelligence to be more
transparent in what they are achieving or not achieving?
Mr. McTigue. The answer is yes, but it is an inexact
science. There will be things that will happen from time to
time that nobody foresaw so that was a risk that they did not
identify and they didn't counter it. But so are most other
things inaccurate and mistakes will be made. But yes, I think
there has to be a yardstick by which you can say we are getting
value for these things to give you a comparison.
Some time ago we had--the Mercatus Center had some
discussions with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission about their
strategic plan and their goals. Their goal is zero incidents.
The only thing that is satisfactory is that there is no
accident, no exposure. So they declare 100 percent success
every year. But that doesn't tell us very much.
What would be more useful is if they could tell us that the
risk of accident has gone up or down. It might have gone up
after September 11. I'd like to know by how much they have
mitigated that over the ensuing period of time. I think it is
not unreasonable for that to be public knowledge.
Mrs. Maloney. Anybody else like to comment?
Mr. Breul. I haven't myself looked at the intelligence
community material but my recollection is that they have been
subject to GPRA and going through that sort of analysis on a
regular basis. It, of course, is not shared on a CD-ROM but it
is part of the normal dialog between them and their clients,
whether it is the leaders in the Pentagon, soldiers in the
field, or others that rely on their product.
Mrs. Maloney. And do they allow for dissent to be part of
the record?
Mr. Breul. I haven't seen the record, so I can't tell you.
But I understand they do follow the GPRA approach.
Mrs. Maloney. Any other comment?
Thank you.
Mr. Platts. I want to come back to something that was
touched on I think by all of you in your written testimony, and
Mr. McTigue, you captured in your opening statement, I think
very well, the issue of codification of this tool or this
process. And if we are looking at trying to expand the
statutory requirements to complement GPRA, that we not codify a
specific tool but just the requirement that there be program-
by-program reviews.
I first would be interested if either of the other two of
you would like to expand on that, the aspect of codifying a
program-by-program review in GPRA so we go from a statutory
strategic plan to a statutory program review, and if we're
going to do that--and then, Mr. McTigue, maybe you want to join
in--should it be all programs over a period of at least once
every 5 years or should it be more targeted as we have heard
Mr. Posner address and ensure strategic prioritization of what
programs have that requirement? And I use the analogy of the
Improper Payments Act where there is a certain percentage or
dollar amount involved, a higher standard requirement kicks in.
So I would be interested in your perspective.
Mr. Posner. The goal is to think about how we sustain this
going forward. There are a lot of elements here that don't
necessarily reach to codification. You have continued to
improve the evaluation data, the instrument that is used, the
executive commitment of buy-in by the agencies, better using
analytic resources through targeting, I think, and frankly,
better using a lot of the existing authorities that we have.
In other words, GPRA provides tremendous information to the
Congress that sometimes is used, but as we have all
acknowledged, there is a lot more that could be done with it.
Rule 10 in the House provides for each committee at the
beginning of a Congress to formulate an oversight agenda. That
is an existing process that could be used to help Congress more
systematically address its performance issues and hook up with
this process.
Frankly, one of the issues that we have talked about over
the years is that GPRA has a governmentwide performance plan
that has frankly never really fulfilled its potential across
administrations, which would do a lot of--at least be the
foundation for what Mr. McTigue was talking about in terms of
the looking at related groups of programs, addressing common
outcomes, and across all sides of the budget, and developing
performance standards and statements, rather that put all of
those in a common plane.
That could be extremely useful just as a source of
information as well as possibly frame the decisionmaking
process itself. So there are, I think, a lot of tools that we
already have that can make this process more sustainable, more
credible, and more meaningful.
On the codification note, you are right, there are lots of
examples and certainly we have always said that one of the
things to promote management initiatives that we have learned
is that Congress needs to be a customer, a buyer, a client, and
ultimately ground things in legislation. We have learned that
in the 1990's with GPRA and CFO, and it has largely been
successful.
The questions I have about codifying PART is that it
addresses a process at the heart of Presidential
decisionmaking. There are real questions about how much you can
standardize something like this across different
administrations with necessarily different styles and different
ways of wanting to hold itself accountable to the people. The
closer you get to the heart of Presidential decisionmaking
potentially the more difficult it would be to prescribe
specific decisionmaking processes and frames for the President
and his Office of Management and Budget to use.
Having said that, if there were such an effort to go
forward, I would tend to side more with the notion of having
possibly a more generic process, one possibility that could be
thought of rather than something prescriptive, is a process
that would require the President to disclose the process he
used in linking performance to budgeting in the budget cycle,
and possibly having some criteria he might address, broad
criteria, generic criteria such as how were related groups of
programs addressed, what kinds of data were used, how was GPRA
utilized in this process and things like that. That might
become something that could be a foundation. But I would tread
fairly warily in this area.
Mr. Platts. Mr. Breul.
Mr. Breul. I would agree with that. I don't see any need to
amend the GPRA or similar statute at this time. I think you
have to be very careful of the question of Presidential
prerogative. The Budget Accounting Act of 1921 gives wide
discretion to the President in this area and I think that is
appropriately so. So I think you need to be very careful about
framing anything that would be overly rigid or prescriptive.
The other problem you have to take some care to look at is
that legislating the PART or the tool itself will probably
result in a bureaucratic exercise of filling out the PART.
Bureaucracy can be good in terms of compliance, and I think it
runs the risk of distracting people to focus on the tool and
the process rather than real results. My inclination would be
to lean toward the use of incentives. When program managers see
that the White House and OMB or the Congress and appropriators
are actually paying attention to results and are using it in
the course of their decisionmaking, they will spend a lot more
attention and devote more to improving program performance. So
I would lean toward the use of incentives and having both the
Congress and the executive pay attention to these matters
rather than legislating it.
Mr. McTigue. Can I just add two comments on that, Mr.
Chairman? The first is just that in the process of governance
there are two things that should always be preserved as the
right of the political process, whether it is the
administration or the Congress, and that is the right to choose
what the government will be involved in, and the right to
determine in what quantity it will be involved in. Those must
always in my view be preserved to the political process. That
is why we elect people to public office.
For the legislature, it also is entitled to know and make
judgments whether those choices made by the administration are,
indeed, delivering the results that they predicted at the time
that they made those choices. And that is why I think that the
process you are going through now is valuable, but that it
still has some maturing to go through. And that is that it is
still extremely difficult for politicians to be able to compare
a range of different activities focused on the one issue and
make decisions whether or not they are producing results that
are reasonable.
In my experience for people in elected office, the more
knowns you can put on the table, the easier it ultimately is to
exercise the value judgment when you have to make decisions
about funding this activity as opposed to that activity. And
some improvement in this area I think would make it easier for
the people in the political process to exercise their value
judgment.
Mr. Platts. I appreciate all three of your perspectives and
I guess I asked the question because I think all of us agree on
the benefits of PART, and it is putting more information, more
known quantities of information on the table. But it could stop
tomorrow under the current system because there are
opportunities for other laws and things to be used. But as
history showed for decades and decades, these other
opportunities were not used even in the last 10 years under
GPRA. They were not readily used until PART was created. And to
ensure that beyond this administration, that we continue a more
programmatic review is why I look at codification perhaps as
being necessary.
And while I have great respect for this administration in
particular, and the discretion of any administration in how
they manage a program, I also think that in the end any
administration is going to be coming to the legislative body
and saying we want you to appropriate funds for this program
and it is the discretion of the legislative body to say if you
want us to even consider that request, we need you to show us a
program assessment of why it is a worthy program.
So we are not saying you have to do it, unless you want
money in the program. So it is kind of like the Federal
Government regularly says to the States: You really don't have
to do this, but if you want money from us to pay for it then
yes, you do. So I don't see it as an excessive infringement but
as a partnership between executive and legislative branches and
each of us having discretion and in this case the executive
branch having discretion of how to design that assessment, what
should the criteria be and the implementation, but that they
have to do it.
Mr. Posner. If I could just provide historical perspective
on this. I do understand the point. You take a couple of recent
examples and the conventional wisdom is that these initiatives
and reforms are short lived and doomed to fail. Take GPRA,
which has been around 10 years and survived two administrations
with different political parties and it has been used in the
budget processes by OMB staff and agencies in both
administrations for different kinds of purposes in diffferent
ways to some extent, but I think that is a success story of how
a performance initiative can gain credibility and become, you
know, a part of the way we do business.
Mr. Platts. That is statute.
Mr. Posner. That is statute.
Mr. Platts. And across administrations. Whether it would
have survived a change of administration, you know, if there
wasn't a statute I think is the question. And it goes to--and I
think, Mr. McTigue, it might have been you that said it earlier
about public scrutiny where you are competing kind of drives
dotting the I's and crossing the T's a little bit more. And if
you are in a program out there and you know that your review is
5 years away and it is currently just an administrative
decision that review is going to happen and there is an
election between now and then and there may be another
administration, you are maybe more likely to think, hey, we may
not have to do that because it is an executive decision and
there may be a different executive. If it is statutory, you
know that it is going to take a change in law for you to be let
off the hook. I think that puts more pressure today on you to
get your house in order rather than waiting. It is a
requirement of law. I see it from the people operating the
programs having a greater incentive.
I do want to get back, but I don't want to overextend my
overtime with my questions. Actually over here, Mr. Towns, if
you had a second round of questions.
Mr. Towns. Well, particularly my thinking is along the same
lines but I am looking at it from the intergovernmental
situation where the program is being administered between the
Federal, State and local governments of government. Classic
example would be Medicaid. How do you deal with a situation
like that? Because it is one thing to have an administration
and another administration, but the point is that you are
talking about different layers of government. To me that sort
of changes the picture a great deal. I am not sure whether my
thinking on this is correct or not, but it seems to me that
these different levels also makes it very difficult to make it
able to control in the fashion that we would like to control or
get the kind of results or find out in terms of the information
we need to have because they might not be structured in a way
that we would be able to actually get the kind of information
we need.
And I am thinking because of the extent that was just made
here, so I would like to get your comments on that, because I
feel very uncomfortable with that process.
Mr. Posner. I think you are right to point to the tensions
here. Many Federal programs achieve their objectives not
through Federal employees but through State, local governments,
private contractors and nonprofits. And the question is do the
goals that we are asserting for these programs get the buy-in
of everybody in that system and that is a real challenge.
Another challenge is how do you develop outcome measures for
programs where you essentially have 50 programs like Medicaid.
Or block grants in particular.
And this is one of those challenges that is not in
particular PART, it is a challenge whenever you try to measure
outcomes of national programs that are not Federal but
national. They are intergovernmental. And I think it is one of
those things that has not frankly gotten enough attention in
the system. It is one where I think different agencies are kind
of struggling to figure out how to proceed.
Mr. Breul. Last year the fiscal 2004 budget identified this
area in which the PART scores and the evidence for grant
programs was particularly weak. Grant programs overall showed
weaker results than direct or regulatory or other programs. The
OMB didn't have a particular answer, they just pointed out that
was one of the observations that was clear from the first 20
percent. I think we can look again this year and see if that is
a continuing pattern and try to see what needs to be done.
Mr. McTigue. I would make a slightly different comment.
Where there are grant programs--and let's just take Medicaid--
the thing that should be measured is by how much did the health
of these cohorts of people improve as a result of this activity
being available? There should be much less dictation of how you
would use the resources and much more focus on by how much did
you improve the health of people. And I think that the problem
is that normally at a Federal or a State level, there is too
much dictation of how you use the money and insufficient
flexibility granted to those who are working at the cutting
edge of the recipients to be able to focus on this being the
needs of this community and we should meet those needs.
In this case it might be access to health care for young
children and in another place it might be the elderly and the
focus should be on showing us by how much you improved the
quality of life or the health or the wellness, if that is
actually a word, of that group of people. So if you move to an
outcome measure as a result of giving grant moneys instead of a
process measure I think you can expect to get better results.
Mr. Towns. Thank you very much. Let me thank all of you.
You have been very helpful. I yield back, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Platts. Thank you, Mr. Towns. I want to turn to the
crosscutting issue and, Mr. Posner, start with you. In your
recommendations one of them is to OMB to do more crosscutting
analysis and comparing apples and apples. I think as good as
PART is and can be, if you are comparing job training program A
today, and 5 years from now you are comparing, analyzing job
training program B, you cannot make truly an informed decision
for the Federal Government as a whole, namely, this is a good
program, but in comparison to this one it is not and we should
have shifted the money.
What response have you gotten from OMB on that specific
recommendation if any? And is there a reason why they are not
embracing that at this point in time?
Mr. Posner. Well, I think it is fair to say that the letter
that we printed in the report from Clay Johnson was very
positive and very constructive, and I think their pledge to
address the issues in the report and other issues continue to
improve the process. On this particular question, the question
of how you focus the decisionmaking process on programs that
cut across agencies and even tools of government is it a
chronic one. It has been a problem that is in our system
frankly in the Congress as well as within the executive.
We have created, I don't need to tell you, a host of
programs, whether you are talking about wildfire, housing,
trade promotion, we can go on and on, well-intentioned efforts
to address programs but we don't think about the systemic
relationships among them or think about how they compete with
one another, as I said before, in addressing common outcomes.
And frankly this is an area that PART could possibly address if
it were more strategically focused. GPRA has a governmentwide
performance plan that could be a vehicle to do this. We are
still waiting to see this being taken more seriously and going
forward.
Mr. Platts. If we are looking at it from the GPRA
perspective, that would be more that we have various agencies
or departments set a part of their strategic goal, is economic
development related and that issue will cross Agriculture,
Transportation, Commerce, but we are still not going to get
into GPRA a finite comparison of the actual dollars being
committed to the broader strategies.
Mr. Posner. The governmentwide plan, at one point OMB
presented earlier a picture of the budget by what we call
budget functions, the 19 major missions of government, where
there was at least some discussion about how all the agencies
are playing into a common set of goals say in the natural
resource area or community development. That has the potential
to be the kind of vehicle to start comparing and contrasting.
That is what we are looking for, some kind of vehicle like
that, and I think PART has the potential as well. This is one
of those areas that each administration is going to have to
kind of decide which areas it wants to focus on and how it
wants to take this on but it is something that really is a
potential that has not been realized yet.
Mr. Platts. Before I get Mr. Breul and Mr. McTigue in this
aspect, in the current budget there was from an analytical
perspective some crosscutting analysis done. And if you have a
comment on the benefit of that and is that a good starting
point for what we are hoping OMB will do with PART?
Mr. Posner. Well, as I looked at--the analytic perspective
has something called crosscutting. Most of the chapters were
things they have done every year, focusing on grant programs
and credit programs and things like that, which are useful
compendiums but they are not really programmatic.
One useful analysis was the homeland security area which
really was first triggered by an act of Congress several years
ago requiring OMB to report every year on all the programs
throughout government--this was before the Department was
created--that address homeland security. And I think usefully
the analysis in the budget at least here brings together over
30 agencies and shows you the relative contributions in 2004
and 2005, addressing most importantly not just the fiscal
analysis, but shows the six strategic areas and strategic goals
in the national homeland security plan and talks about how the
different agencies are addressing and playing into those. That
is the basis now for crosscutting analysis, potentially.
Mr. Platts. Mr. Breul and McTigue, if you wanted to address
the broad issue, and maybe the benefits of crosscutting, and a
second part is if we continue to take the OMB approach that
we're looking at all thousand or so programs, does OMB have the
resources to be able to do this in an effective means or is it
all the more important that we are strategic in what programs
are run through the PART process?
Mr. Breul. I think you have hit a very important question
here, and that has a couple of competing tensions. One, of
course, is that you don't want to let any program in the
government escape this analysis. And for that reason working up
toward the end or at least other tranche or 2 of 20 percent is
important so we get rather complete coverage.
But turning around and having a focus on related and
crosscutting programs is very important. I think OMB has
recognized that and as they begin to catch up and do reviews
and go back and look at programs, that will happen more and
more because the OMB has traditionally done that as part of the
budget process. It has recognized that as an important element,
whether they are looking at homeland security, wetlands,
research and development, climate change. Crosscutting issues
are, in fact, the way you get a very powerful look at competing
ways of realizing an objective and agencies that are doing much
the same thing in different organizations.
So I think it is a very powerful way of looking at things.
The subtlety that has to be remembered though is that some of
these programs--the first is there are programs that are
clearly in competition with one another. There are programs
that are doing the same thing the same way. There are other
programs that are really alternatives to one another. They may
be doing the same thing, but they are doing it a different way.
And you are going to find some programs operating in parallel.
They are doing the same thing but they are doing it for
different populations or regions or areas of the country.
And finally there are going to be some programs that are
complementary, where for a particular endeavor you need a
little bit of this and that, and only in combination do they
yield you the results that you want. The notion of crosscutting
has an immediate appeal that you can kind of sort out with
immediacy. Really, what it is really is another set of
information that enriches the debate and gives you far more
perspectives and a different set of prisms to look at that set
of problems and more to think about as you make the management
and budget decisions.
Mr. Platts. Mr. McTigue, your focus on the public benefits
derived or produced seems that this would be all the more
important of achieving the most accountability when we talk
about benefits. And I look at some of the numbers, economic
development programs, 300 different economic development
programs, 300 programs serving at-risk youth, 90 childhood
development. I mean, the list goes on. To make an informed
decision we need to have all of those apples together.
Mr. McTigue. Right. My comment, Mr. Chairman, would be
this. I think it was fair and reasonable for OMB to take a
random sampling of programs when it first started to use the
program assessment rating tool across a variety of activities
that give them an indication of how useful this process was and
how it needed to be improved. But in the long term I think that
rather than picking out programs, they should pick out outcomes
and decide we will look at all of the programs that address
adult literacy or all the programs that address child literacy
or employability among this group of people. Then of course
what you are really doing is you are starting to look at where
do we have the best results for which delivery organizations
and with which programs.
There is a risk in doing that, that has to be addressed at
the same time. And that is that few programs have only one
outcome. Most of them address a primary outcome and then will
have second and third tier outcomes. It might be a program
designed to address employability but it might be employability
for socially disadvantaged people and people with a high risk
of criminality. So if you are very effective in diminishing
their criminality, that may outweigh the performance in all the
other areas.
Looking at the spectrum of the program and weighing it up
when you go to outcome based scrutiny is important and critical
before you make decisions. But ultimately it is the only way
you can start to look at that spectrum of activity and say here
are areas among the 90 programs where we have high levels of
effectiveness. Here are areas where we have moderate levels of
effectiveness, and here are areas where we have low levels.
A device that was used in the government that I was part
of, was that in doing that we used to decide that we would
maintain at the very least the current level of public benefit.
So if we were doing employability programs, we were going to
maintain this number of people placed into employment during
the ensuing year. And then we would look at parts of native
people, how many of them, how many would be long-term
unemployed and how many with disabilities, etc. What you
started to construct is this is what government expects to get
for the investment it makes in a program designed to impact
employability. And then you can look at the resource. And in
many instances, the resource required to maintain that current
level of public benefit was significantly less than what we had
been spending across the range of say hypothetically the 90
programs.
Mr. Platts. You are eliminating the overhead of all of
those different programs and really consolidating the service
provided?
Mr. McTigue. What you are also focusing on is the cost per
unit of success. Can we maximize the number of people we will
place back into work at the lowest possible price? But also
recognizing that we are still going to maintain the public
benefit for at-risk people, people with previous criminal
records or whatever it might be.
Mr. Platts. Mr. Towns, did you have other questions?
OK. Is it a fair assumption, Mr. McTigue, that with the
initial look at all the different programs, would you suggest
that OMB go through the entire 5-year review of every program
to establish a baseline for all programs and then move into
this maybe outcome-based approach? Or do you think we should be
looking at that sooner?
Mr. McTigue. If I were making the decision, I would move
almost right away to looking at it through outcomes. I think
that in terms of the best interests of budget preparation,
being able to say we have examined the whole cohort of programs
that address issues like employability is much more valuable
when you make budget allocations than saying we have looked at
20 percent of them because the 20 percent of them that you look
at might be the best performers or the worst performers. They
are probably going to be a mix.
I think the testing of the tool and the utility of
critically looking at what is declared to be the performance of
a program has been proven. That is useful. Now trying to make
that tool perform much more effectively for the interests of
both Congress and the administration would say let's start to
look at all of the activities across government that address
this issue. If it is security, then let's look at all the
things across security, see the ones that have the greatest
impact on diminishing risk and the ones that have only marginal
impact on diminishing risk.
Mr. Platts. When I look at some of the results of the PART
assessments and saying effective recommendation is this goes to
another program which we think is more effective, if you
haven't done PART on all of those other programs how do you
actually know that it is more effective in the criteria in
comparison to this specific criteria unless you have done them
all together? I share the position that the sooner the better
to make it all the more effective and, in the end, used. I
mean, you can have the information, but what we are really
after is this information be acted upon and that crosscutting
of assessments is critical to it actually being used by
Congress and the administration. Did anyone want to add on that
issue?
I was curious, Mr. Posner, what your interactions with OMB
and just the process that OMB is going through, first round,
234 and then coming back roughly a third of those for a second
round. Was there any explanation shared with GAO on how and why
they chose that specific third for a second versus the other
ones that were reviewed?
Mr. Posner. Well, we focused our review on the 2004 process
because that was public and there was a longstanding issue
about predecisional information.
Mr. Platts. Report is on 2004, but in your new actions have
you had any dialog about going into the 2005 where they say
this time we're going to do these 80 or so?
Mr. Posner. What I think we captured is not the specific
decisions because those are somewhat delegated to the RMOs,
even the major functions areas in OMB to decide, but I think we
noted some changes in the process that are notable. I think we
learned a lot in 2004. One is the process was moved up. It
became a spring process rather than crunched into the budget
season like it had to be in 2004. There was some training done
and there were some refinements in the instrument that were
modified, questions and things like that, some additional
guidance and the like.
So those are the things that we picked up. There were some
changes made in how the reviews were followed up and things
like that that were done.
I think that it still remains to be seen. We haven't really
taken a look at the 2005 selections and really understood--we
have seen what is in the press and what is on the Web, but at
this point, that is what we have.
Mr. Platts. And kind of a followup question--maybe it is
premature as well because it relates to the--well actually it
is 2004 and I guess 2005 in the sense of the funding decisions
that were made in 2004--have you been able to look at the logic
of the PART on these programs and say this is ineffective and
we recommend defunding and this is what happened? Is there a
good feel for the logic in your opinion of how those
recommendations were or were not followed?
Mr. Posner. I think what is important is when OMB stated
absolutely appropriately that there is no formulaic approach to
this process. Performance budgeting is not about a mechanical
link between performance trends and budget decisions. If the
program does poorly and it is a high priority, it doesn't
necessarily mean you are going to reduce funding. In fact you
might find cause to increase funding. If the drug abuse deaths
go up you might need to increase funding. This information
needs to inform the agenda, the questions you ask. It doesn't
necessarily tell you the answers on a budget decision because
there are lots of other factors that are involved, and that is
what we found. There was a relationship, I think it is fair to
say, and we have some information in the report showing that
the programs deemed effective generally did better in the 2004
process and the programs deemed ineffective generally did
worse. But there was not a tight relationship nor should there
be.
I think what is more significant is what we found--and this
is consistent with the observations about performance budgeting
in States and other areas--is that the real impact that this
information is having, at least initially, is not so much on
funding levels because they are determined by so many other--
further, as I say, it is on the management and design of
programs. And when you look at the kinds of things that came
out of the 2004 process, 80 percent of those recommendations
focused on measures, goals, the program design, shifting from
one kind of grant process to another to try to get more bang
for the buck out of these programs. That is what you would
expect properly.
Mr. Platts. With that benefit being in the 2004, 80 percent
being more the management, worst case scenario, we don't get a
crosscutting analysis, Congress is not very dutiful in actually
using the information in the appropriations process. It seems
that the PART process still would have a tremendous benefit
because even though you are going to have 300 different
economic development programs, hopefully they will be better
run and more effective individual programs from the management
of those because of PART. Is that a fair statement?
Mr. Posner. I think that is right. We hope it is beyond
that, with the major caveat that there is a significant
followup that has to be done and some monitoring. We would like
to see more of it and some of these things call for
congressional action, frankly, in the area of foster care and
things like that. But, yes, I think that is right there, is a
substantial value right there.
Mr. Platts. And maybe a broad question that comes back when
you talked about appropriators earlier is one of the
recommendations about OMB, I think having more of an education
process with Congress. What do you see along those lines from
OMB and GAO's perspective?
Mr. Posner. We have seen some effort made recently to brief
Congress and a number of committees about the results of the
2005 process. I think what--rather than kind of evaluate or
comment on what OMB has done recently because we just don't
know everything they have been doing, I think what we are
calling for is a process of proactive involvement by the
Congress at the front end of these things. What we are saying
is that even though it supports a Presidential process to get
the broad base that you need to establish the support, you are
going to have to gain the input of the appropriators and the
authorizers and the overseers in deciding what the reviewing
are going to be all about. Basically, that is a challenge
frankly to the Congress as well as to OMB. OMB may have to
change its own style and procedures of a budget process that is
inherently executive related.
We have already seen some information that is much more
than we ever saw before in this regard. Congress may have to
kind of think more clearly about how it is going to organize
itself more comprehensively to address this. Some of us have
thought about what Congress was presented with in the 1970's
when the President had a comprehensive budget and the budget
process and Congress didn't have a budget process at the time.
And it was challenged to address a President that saw both
sides of the budget when Congress didn't do that.
Congress stepped up to the plate and developed the
Congressional Budget Act. The question is whether we are seeing
something similar evolve here. The President is already on the
road to developing a comprehensive performance assessment and
perspective on government and governance, and how Congress is
going to position itself to deal with that information.
Are we going to create a more consolidated or systematic
way to digest and respond to that as a body? Are we going to do
it in a disaggregated way that is more familiar? That is the
decision that you are going to decide, obviously. That is the
challenge. What we are seeing is the potential to have that
same kind of challenge develop here.
Mr. Platts. And you reference Homeland Security and
comparing in the budget analysis the various assignments or
goals, and you look at how many different committees and
subcommittees that one department answers to up here as far as
trying to streamline the view of what it is doing, whether it
is most effective. With Secretary Ridge being my former
Governor and someone I have great respect for, what a challenge
for the Secretary to be answering to 80 committees and
subcommittees in total. I think you are right on long term. As
the executive branch is kind of reorganized there is a need for
Congress to try to work hand in hand.
We are going to be running short on time. One of the
questions is how this could be used with authorization programs
or reauthorization or sunsetting of programs. Mr. Breul, you
touched on that I think as part of your testimony. There have
been a number of proposals about sunset commissions being
established to make a determination or recommendations about
sunsetting programs.
If PART is as effective as we hope it will be long term.
The question is, is it in essence going to fulfill that role in
that the information by PART can be used and there won't be a
need for these kind of independent sunset commissions?
Mr. Breul. Well, what PART will help do is provide the
analytic basis to make some decisions. Then the decisionmaking
body and the commitment to actually go through and make the
determination one way or another is not something the PART
alone will fill. But it does provide one set of lenses to judge
program management and then the actual results that are
achieved, and that is very important information in any kind of
sunset decision.
Mr. Platts. OK.
I think we are going to wrap up there. I wanted to give
each of you an opportunity if there is anything you wanted to
add based on the Q and A period. Mr. McTigue.
Mr. McTigue. Can I just add one component to what is the
long-term impact on appropriators going to be? And in my view
probably 2 or 3 years from now, the fact that this information
exists, how effective is this program compared to that program
will enable us, the public, to be able to say there was a very
significant benefit foregone. You could have placed 5 million
people into work and you placed 2\1/2\ million people into
work. Mr. Appropriator, why did you vote to not give those
people jobs?
Information will not stand alone. Once it is produced it
will be used by a number of people in different ways and bring
accountability to the political process itself. There would be
very good reasons for making those decisions but politicians
will have to make those reasons transparent.
Mr. Platts. Very important point. Because as you work with
the Government Accoutability Project, this information being so
public, and as Mr. Breul talked about the CD-ROM that it is out
there in an unprecedented fashion, is not just about executive
branch, it isn't just about Congress, but about other groups
such as your own effort being able to hold us accountable.
And the accountability we talked about the program manager
applies to the elected officials as well and this information
will ensure--and we better be ready with our whys--why we voted
against it or why we voted for it--when that information is
available and acted upon.
I want to finally, again, thank each of you. Great
testimony, both written and your oral testimonies here today
and really assisting our committee and both members and staff
as we move forward on this and try to really help push the
process along with the administration. My sincere gratitude to
each of you. And I know that there is a lot of preparation time
that goes into this 2-hour block here today that is well beyond
2 hours. So thank you.
I also want to thank both majority and minority committee
staff for their work in preparing for this hearing. And the
record will remain open for 2 weeks from this date for those
who want to submit additional information for the hearing and
for possible inclusion. And everybody have a good day. This
hearing stands adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 3:40 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]
<all>