No abstract

In this paper, the authors use the Bush administration's management grades from the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) to evaluate performance budgeting in the federal government -in particular, the role of merit and political considerations in formulating recommendations for 234 programs in the president's fi scal year 2004 budget. PART scores and political support were found to infl uence budget choices in expected ways, and the impact of management scores on budget decisions diminished as the political component was taken into account. Th e Bush administration's management scores were positively correlated with proposed budgets for programs housed in traditionally Democratic departments but not in other departments. Th e federal government's most ambitious eff ort to use performance budgeting to date shows both the promise and the problems of this endeavor. I n the last decade, performance measurement has emerged as the most important public sector management reform in many years, surpassing even management by objectives, total quality management, zero-based budgeting, and program planning and budgeting in the speed and breadth of adoption. Nearly all of the states use some form of performance measurement, and the federal government has also implemented performance measurement in various ways. Closely related to performance measurement is the idea of performance budgeting, or performancebased budgeting, which seeks to link the fi ndings of performance measurement to budget allocations ( Joyce 1999 ). Performance budgeting has been widely adopted abroad ( Schick 1990 ), and, as of 1998, 47 out of 50 states had adopted some form of performance budgeting ( Melkers and Willoughby 1998 ). Both performance measurement and performance budgeting are part of a worldwide eff ort to transform public management ( Kettl 2000 ).Starting with the fi scal year (FY) 2004 budget, the Offi ce of Management and Budget (OMB) began to include performance and management assessments of federal programs and to use that performance information in allocating budget resources. Th is initiative is called PART, short for Program Assessment Rating Tool. In this paper, we explore performance budgeting through an examination of the PART experiment. Specifi cally, we investigate the role that merit and political considerations played in formulating OMB recommendations for the 234 programs in the president's FY 2004 budget proposal.Th is paper has three goals: Th e fi rst is to assess the extent to which budget allocations in the president's FY 2003 budget were infl uenced by merit, as measured by PART scores; we found that PART scores and political support infl uenced budget choices in expected ways. Th e second goal is to assess the extent to which the observed relationships between performance measures and budgets were a function of political infl uence on the PART scores themselves. It is possible that the positive relationship between PART scores and the budget was the result of partisan elements of the PART scores. We found that the im...

No abstract

In this article, we use the Bush administration's management grades to analyze whether programs administered by senior executives are better managed than those administered by political appointees requiring Senate confirmation. We explain the administration's management grading scheme and how it can be informative for evaluating comparative management quality. We explain why senior-executive-run programs should be better managed than appointee-run programs and test our claim with data on 234 federal programs. We find that political-appointee-run programs earn systematically lower grades in most management areas. We conclude that a systematic review of the proper role of political appointees in federal program management should be considered.

No abstract