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Government Leader home > news stories
02/14/06
NPR set the stage for performance-based government
By Rob Thormeyer
Government Leader Staff
Although the President’s Management Agenda has certainly driven change in how agencies operate and are held accountable, it is not as revolutionary as some people may think.
Doris Hausser, senior policy adviser to the director and chief human capital officer at the Office of Personnel Management and career government employee, said the PMA is only the latest in several efforts to establish a more performance-based government workforce.
In fact, the PMA is more of a complement to the most recent effort, the Clinton administration’s National Partnership for Reinventing Government.
“The NPR changed the conversation,” Hausser recently told a forum in Washington sponsored by the Association for Federal Information Resource Management. “We learned different ways to think about things.”
Steve Kelman, a former Office of Federal Procurement Policy administrator and current professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, echoed Hausser’s sentiments.
“The National Performance Review, I think, put in motion and helped out with the idea of results-based government,” Kelman said, speaking at the same event.
The NPR was a program within former Vice President Al Gore’s Reinventing Government initiative that tried to streamline operations by reducing the government’s size and cost.
Through the NPR, the Clinton administration reduced the overall size of the government by 426,000 civilian positions between January 1993 and September 2000 and saved the country about $136 billion, according to an NPR archive hosted on the University of North Texas’ Web site.
Also, many NPR programs later became part of the administration’s E-Government initiative, including the creation of FirstGov.gov, the government’s main Web portal for information, news and services.
Adjusting to the NPR was “a really tough chore for federal workers,” Hausser said.
A performance-based environment means employees are not just showing up to do their jobs, Hausser said, but it also means finding out how their work affects their agency from an organizational standpoint.
The PMA scorecard, though, took the Clinton initiative to new levels.
Under the PMA, agencies must comply with five areas—human capital management, competitive sourcing, e-government, financial performance, and budget performance and integration.
The Office of Management and Budget releases quarterly scorecards of each agency’s progress, with those in compliance achieving the coveted “green” score, while those who are not are given a “yellow” or “red” score.
The most recent scorecard was released in mid-November.
According to Hausser, agencies are taking the PMA initiatives seriously.
“The power of the PMA is enormous…and stunning,” Hausser said. “Senior executives are very tough-minded about their scoring [on the PMA]. And the standards keep ratcheting up, [so] what was outstanding last year may not be this year.”
And more changes are coming if the administration can successfully shepherd its Working for America Act, which would usher in a performance-based pay system for government workers [Government Leader, January/February 2006, Page 12].
Federal workers are “coming to a cold and hard reality” that the pay-scale structure has to change, Hausser said.
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