Recommendations for the Obama Administration on Program Performance and Evaluation

In less than two weeks, President-elect Barack Obama will be sworn in to office. As the Obama Administration determines its approach to assessing program performance, we hope that they learn from the current PART process. Our recommendations include:

Create buy in, especially from Congress

If President-elect Obama truly wants to create an effective way to assess program performance, he must have buy-in from Congress, OMB, federal agencies, stakeholders and the public. Congress and other stakeholders do not trust PART as it currently stands. It is considered a subjective process that can vary significantly from reviewer to reviewer and across agencies. Future program performance or evaluation systems must ensure fair, impartial, and evenly applied outcomes across all programs and the systems should have the support of agencies and stakeholders across the political spectrum.

PART is currently run by the executive branch with little input from the legislative branch - the body that ultimately decides program funding. But it is possible to create a system that allows for Congressional input, either early on as the system is created or throughout the process. For example, the process could involve the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional investigative arm with experience in performance and accountability, in partnership with the Office of Management and Budget. Or Congress could write into legislation some or all of the indicators used to judge a particular program's performance. As such, Congress's intentions would be clear and program staff and stakeholders would be informed of the measures to be used to assess them.

Ensure staff capacity and expertise

The Obama Administration must ensure that the federal government has the capacity and expertise to assess program performance across different agencies and programs. Well constructed assessments take time and expertise to implement and can easily overextend OMB and agency staff. A more robust and comprehensive program performance system, therefore, must be adequately funded and staffed.

Ensure assessments are appropriately tailored to the program they assess

While having a common assessment for government programs can be useful, the one size fits all approach does not always capture the wide variance in missions and expected outcomes across federal programs. Measuring the performance of a Department of Defense weapons program is obviously different than assessing programs that provide human services, especially education. Future program performance systems need to take into account the type of service being provided and make sure that the corresponding assessments accurately and fairly capture the results. Other types of assessments need to be used for programs where experimental design studies are problematic or small programs where the costs of a study would be prohibitive.

Invest in a research agenda

A large share of a program's score on the PART is determined by whether or not it has demonstrated results through a high quality evaluation. Unfortunately, many programs have not participated in the research and evaluation necessary to determine whether they are effective or not - particularly Department of Education programs. As a general rule, programs on the ground do not have the resources needed to conduct larger scale evaluations. In order to properly assess a program's performance, the federal government needs to invest more money in research. Increasing funding for high quality research at the federal level will guide policymakers to more effectively use taxpayer dollars.

The future of PART

After President-elect Obama is sworn in on January 20th, he will have an opportunity to focus on program performance and eliminate programs that don't work. While we don't have details on the new Administration's plans for assessing program performance, we do have some clues. The initial ideas put forward by the Obama-Biden team include:

• Create a team within the White House to focus on program performance and results for federal programs. This "SWAT team" will be lead by a new Chief Performance Officer who will report directly to the president.
• "Fundamentally reconfigure" the Program Assessment Rating Tool. The performance measurement process will be opened up to "the public, Congress, and outside experts" and ideological goals will be changed.
• Implement consequences for program performance. Performance teams will be sent in to reform programs that don't work. This may be accomplished by replacing management, shifting resources, or implementing improvement action plans. In some cases, programs may have to be eliminated.

Evaluating the effectiveness of federal programs is an incredibly complex task. We hope that President-elect Obama will usher in a new era in program assessment that will build on and improve the current PART process.

This is the last post in our series on the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART). We will continue to follow developments with PART and program assessment under the new Administration. Please let us know if you have any questions or feedback!