President's FY05 Budget Delivers Big Dividends
on Performance Budgetingn
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| FOR IMMEDIATE
RELEASE :
February 2, 2004
CONTACT: David Zeliff, Director of Communications
| (703) 894-0481 | [email protected] |
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ARLINGTON, Va. - With the release of the President's
'05 budget today, the federal government is taking another
bold step towards a comprehensive "performance
budgeting" system for the federal budget. Moreover,
given that the President's budget uses performance information
to eliminate 13 federal programs and save over $1 billion
in federal funds, the use of performance budgeting offers
opportunities to save taxpayers billions.
"Performance budgeting is finally paying dividends
for taxpayers," notes Carl DeMaio, president of
the Performance Institute. "We can credit an Administration
that has stuck to its promise to evaluate the performance
of federal programs and actually impose positive and
negative consequences in the budget based on performance."
The President's '05 budget proposal delivers on a promise
made early in the Administration to subject over half
of federal programs to rigorous performance evaluations
and tie agency budgets to those evaluations. To fully
and fairly evaluate federal programs, the White House's
Office of Management and Budget developed systematic,
methodological, and evidence-based assessment system
known as the Program Assessment Rating Tool" (PART).
The '05 budget contains PART "scores" for
399 programs this year (nearly half of all federal expenditures.)
"While performance information has been included
periodically in previous budgets, the '05 budget is
jammed-packed with performance information for almost
half of all federal programs. "Most importantly,
the big news in the '05 budget is the USE of performance
information to terminate or make targeted reforms in
poor-performing programs while expand programs with
solid results," DeMaio notes.
Now in its second year, the PART evaluation process
demonstrates that many federal programs are actually
starting to take accountability for performance seriously.
Programs rated as effective, moderately effective or
adequate rose to 58.2 percent over 44.5 percent from
last year. Programs rated ineffective or results not
demonstrated dropped to 42.9 percent from 55.5 percent
last year. The highest increase was the number of programs
showing results not demonstrated. That number fell sharply
from 50.4 percent last year to 37.1 percent this year.
"Based on the improvement in the scores, it is
clear that this year managers got the message that the
President was serious about evaluating performance and
using the budget to impose consequences, both positive
and negative," DeMaio concludes.
Attention will now turn to Congress-which could base
its decisions on the performance reviews or disregard
the performance all together. "Congress must engage
in performance budgeting and hold itself accountable
for getting better performance from federal programs,"
DeMaio notes.
The Performance Institute is a private think tank seeking
to improve government performance through the principles
of competition, accountability, performance and transparency.
The Institute serves as the nation's leading authority
and repository on performance-based management practices
for government. Its mission is to identify, study and
disseminate the leading management innovations pioneered
by "best-in-class" organizations. Complete
information on the PART process and the '05 budget is
available at www.transparentgovernment.org.
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