Taking
PART
If
Virginia wants to promote efficiency in state
government, it should adopt the Performance
Assessment Rating Tool that President Bush is
using to tame the federal bureaucracy.
True
budget reform remains at the center of the policy
discussion in Richmond,
as highlighted recently by Gov. Mark R. Warner's
recent projections of budget deficits through the
end of the decade. While many changes are needed
to Virginia’s
budgeting process, and to the actual document
itself, none is more important than performance
and budget integration.
With a little
more a year left in his
administration, there is little more that Gov.
Warner will be able to fully implement.
However, it should be noted that the
Governor and his administration have laid a
foundation for serious reform.
Most
of Warner’s reforms are documented on the “Virginia
Excels” webpage.
(Editor's note: link is now dead.) One
particular initiative holds much promise to
achieving budget and performance integration.
The “Management Scorecard” is a great
first step, yet it demonstrates how far we still have to go.
The
management scorecard gives little or no attention to
performance i.e., delivering results to taxpayers.
to achieve a top score agencies have only to “develop and document agency
priorities in agency strategic plan, and
communicate in at least two ways within thirty
days of development to all managers and staff.”
The scorecard requires no tie between actual performance
and delivery of results.
A generous characterization might describe the
scorecard as holding
promise for the future. But with more potential
deficits looming we don't have the luxury of
waiting for that promise to materialize.
Any
fair-minded observer would have to concede that
meaningful reform does not happen overnight. Here
in Virginia, Secretary
of Administration Sandra Bowen should be lauded
for her efforts to lay a solid foundation for
the next administration.
Yet the administration needs to display a greater
sense of urgency -- and it has no farther to look
than across the Potomac River for an example of
what can be accomplished.
In
less time and
on a larger scale, President George W. Bush has initiated and fully implemented budget and
performance integration at the federal level. One
of the President's key initiatives is
the Performance Assessment
Rating Tool (PART).
The PART analysis is a
standardized and evidence-based evaluation that
provides hard data on whether federal programs are
doing what taxpayers are paying for them to do and
assesses whether they are being managed properly.
In
each of the last three years, PART reviews
have examined a fifth of the federal
government. Over the past three years, nearly two-thirds of
the federal government
has been reviewed. The federal government has
done far more to make accountable its huge,
sprawling and dispersed bureaucracy than
Virginia's leadership has done to tame its state
bureaucracy. Richmond has not yet incorporated any
comparable effort.
PART
investigates
the most important aspects of performance.
It enables managers to paint an in-depth
picture of just what exactly they are achieving,
or if they are achieving anything at all. Agencies
are scored as either "Effective,"
"Moderately Effective,"
"Adequate," "Ineffective" or
"Results Not Demonstrated.”
The Management Scorecard does use similar
ratings. However,
at the federal level there is a clear link between the
rating and an agency’s budget.
In
fiscal year 2005, “effective” programs enjoyed
an average increase of 7.18 percent to their
budget.
"Adequate"
programs saw an average budget decrease of 1.64
percent. While
"ineffective" programs were cut by a
dramatic average of 37.68 percent. In addition, 15
federal programs were eliminated for failing to
perform, resulting in savings over $1 billion.
This
signals a seriousness about delivering results and
performance to the taxpayer.
Unfortunately, this signal is currently
absent from Virginia’s
management scorecard or from the budgeting process
in general.
Without
data on performance and results, we can’t tell
success from failure.
In addition we continue to reward failures
equally with successes.
A link between performance and budget must
be established if we’re serious about reforming
how Virginia’s government works.
Richmond
can learn a lot from the federal government and
the PART process. Borrowing
a similar process would allow for immediate
implementation and get
Virginia
on the long hard road of meaningful, true budget
reform. The prospect of future deficits makes
action all the more imperative. A Virginia version
of the PART process would help the
next administration build on the foundation
that the Warner administration has already
accomplished. Until
then, reform efforts will largely remain at
the
margin.
--
November 15, 2004
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