When the Bush administration rides off, how much of the PMA will remain?

“This should not be something that changes from administration to administration,” Portman told Government Leader. “We have to keep the momentum moving. We have to be sure there is a seamless transition to the next administration, Republican or Democrat.”

Whether agencies lose the incentive to meet performance goals as the Bush administration winds down in the next 12 to 24 months remains to be seen. Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, said it’s up to the executive branch to make sure that doesn’t happen.

“It’s going to depend on how the administration drives it,” he said. Whatever happens in the next two years and in the 2008 presidential election, there are threads of government reform woven into law that will connect future administrations, experts say.

Indeed, continuity between government reform efforts is “hardly a new phenomenon,” said Jonathan Breul, senior fellow at the IBM Center for the Business of Government.

For example, some tenets of the Government Performance and Results Act, which was signed by President Clinton and designed to help managers measure performance and meet program goals, have their origins in concepts developed by Reagan administration reformers.

In fact, every administration in the last 40 years has taken a crack at government reform. “Each president is going to put their own stamp on the process,” Breul said.

The PMA, arguably, is simply President Bush’s adaptation of GPRA and other prior reform initiatives.

Bush’s twist is the color-coded scorecard used to grade executive agencies in five areas—budget and performance integration, competitive sourcing, e-government, financial performance and human capital.

"We have to be sure there is a seamless transition to the next administration, Republican or Democrat." —Rob Portman, OMB

Results are still uneven. In the latest scorecard, only one agency, the Labor Department, scored “green” for success—as opposed to “yellow” for mixed results and “red” for unsatisfactory—in all five categories. Most agencies got yellow scores in most categories.

Breul said such public ratings mean greater transparency in government—a practice the next administration could fruitfully build on.

Administration officials point out other areas of promise. Clay Johnson, OMB’s deputy director for management, cites the Office of Personnel Management’s effort to test performance-based management practices at “beta sites” established at various federal agencies.

One of these beta sites is OPM’s own division of Human Capital Leadership. OPM employees can earn bonuses based on detailed performance appraisals, and the results of such a system have been “magical,” Johnson said.

“The quality of the conversation between manager and employee is incredible,” Johnson said. “It’s incredibly rich.”

That, Portman said, is well worth continuing.

“It’s sort of the unsung story of the last four or five years,” he said. “We’ve really begun a quiet revolution among the federal agencies: a focus on performance and results.”

Nonetheless, the administration has launched an effort to defend the PMA against critics, recently posting a “myth vs. fact” page on the PMA Web site (www.results.gov).

One “myth” is that the administration wants to reform the government’s personnel system just to reduce spending. The page states that there is a “widespread consensus that the pay system must be changed” and that the goal of reform is not to save money but to better serve employees and taxpayers by requiring agencies to better manage, develop and reward employees.

Another “myth” is that the Program Assessment Rating Tool is just a way for the administration to cut programs it doesn’t like. The page says the primary purpose of PART is to make sure federal programs live up to their congressionally mandated intent and are effectively managed to provide best value for taxpayers. Moreover, PART is rarely the basis for “program termination proposals”; if a program is ineffective, it may just need more money.

The page also points out that PART received an Innovations in American Government Award in 2005 from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. It also addresses the “myth” that competitive sourcing is a scheme to get rid of federal employees. Not so, it says: Historically, only about 5 percent of employees are “involuntarily separated” from federal service as a result of competition.