This article examines the PART initiative of the United States Office of Management and Budget from a practical standpoint: how federal agencies have dealt with the requirements of PART andIn the 1990s, Congress and the executive branch established a statutory and management framework for strengthening government performance and accountability. The Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 was its centrepiece -providing congressional and executive decision makers with objective information on the effectiveness and efficiency of federal programmes and spending. The Bush administration has made integrating performance information into budget deliberations one of five government-wide management priorities under its President's Management Agenda. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has been using a Program Assessment Rating Tool, or PART, to assess programme performance and consider the information collected by PART during the annual budget review process. Professor Gilmour's report examines OMB's PART initiative from a practical standpoint: How have federal agencies dealt with the requirements of PART? What strategies have they employed to be successful? What challenges do they face? His report highlights four challenges that confront both agencies and OMB as they work to complete assessments of all 1 000 programmes and describes approaches that agencies are taking to meet these challenges. The first challenge is for departments and agencies to organise for success. The second challenge of using PART is communicating accomplishments. The third is the challenge of developing suitable measures, and the fourth challenge is linking performance to outcomes.We hope that this timely and informative report will be useful to public managers who want to understand how federal programmes have responded to PART and learn from the experience of programme-level and bureau-level staff in dealing with the demands of PART.
IMPLEMENTING OMB'S PROGRAM ASSESSMENT RATING TOOL (PART)OECD JOURNAL ON BUDGETING -VOLUME 7 -No. 1 -ISSN 1608-7143 -© OECD 2007
Executive summaryPerformance budgeting and performance measurement, considered together, are the most ambitious public sector management reforms adopted in the last half century. This report is a study of the implementation of a federal performance budgeting management tool called PART, for Program Assessment Rating Tool. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) initiated it in 2003 and will have completed assessments of all federal programmes by 2007. Performance budgeting addresses persistent difficulties in government budgeting, particularly the problems of knowing where to allocate resources most efficiently and holding programme managers accountable for producing results. Still, there are significant challenges in successfully realising the goals of performance budgeting.OMB's implementation of performance budgeting is comprehensive and impressive, reflecting careful design and determined follow-through. This report examines the implementation of PART and the four challe...