President Obama’s Management Agenda Archives

President Obama’s Management Agenda

The Obama administration will overhaul the Bush administration’s methods of evaluating program performance of federal agencies according to recently released budget documents. Contained in the section, “Building a High-Performing Government” of the analytical perspectives volume of the fiscal 2010 budget, the Obama administration set forth its plan to replace the Performance Assessment Rating Tool (PART) with a new performance improvement and analysis framework.
This framework will switch the focus from grading programs as successful or unsuccessful to requiring agency leaders to set priority goals, demonstrate progress in achieving goals, and explain performance trends.

In developing this approach, the administration will engage the public, Congress, and outside experts to develop a better and more open performance measurement process that improves results and outcomes for federal government programs while reducing waste and inefficiencies.

As stated in the analytical perspectives, the administration will work with agency leaders and the Program Improvement Council (PIC) in the coming months “to develop options for:

Establishing a comprehensive program and performance measurement system that shows how Federal programs link to agency and Government-wide goals;
Reforming program assessment and performance measurement processes to emphasize the reporting of performance trends, explanations for the trends, mitigation of implementation risks, and plans for improvement with accountable leads;
Streamlining reporting requirements under GPRA and PART to reduce the burden on agencies and OMB;
Improving the communication of performance results to Congress, the public, and other stakeholders through better data display in agency reports and the ExpectMore.gov website; and
Launching a comprehensive research program to study the comparative effectiveness of different program strategies to ensure that programs achieve their ultimate desired outcomes.”

SOURCE: Government Executive.com, “Obama Team Outlines Its Management Agenda” by Elizabeth Newell, May 11, 2009.

If you would like to learn more about these reform efforts, TheCapitol.Net offers “Advanced Federal Budget Process: Integrating Performance and the Budget.” See www.BudgetProcess.com for more information.

Also see "The Age of Debt: Barack Obama's first budget promises 'fiscal responsibility'--and delivers the opposite."