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Government Leader home > news stories
10/11/06
OMB to stress accountability on reform over next two years
By Mark Tarallo
Special to Government Leader
Better accountability and more transparency will be the goals of the Bush administration’s government-reform efforts as its second term winds down over the next two years, officials at the Office of Management and Budget said.
Accountability is a key tenet of the President’s Management Agenda, and administration officials are encouraged with the results so far, despite uneven progress, OMB director Rob Portman said at a recent Washington luncheon sponsored by the IBM Center for the Business of Government and the National Academy of Public Administration.
Under the PMA, OMB grades each federal agency using a color-coded scorecard for five categories — budget and performance integration, competitive sourcing, e-government, financial performance and human capital. In the latest scorecard released last July, the Labor Department was the only agency to score “green” for success — as opposed to “yellow” for mixed results and “red” for unsatisfactory — in all five categories. Most agencies, however, still earned yellow scores in many categories.
Nonetheless, the government has made significant progress on transparency and accountability as well as improved financial management, said OMB deputy director of management Clay Johnson, who also spoke at the event.
“I am really, really confident that we have raised the bar,” he said.
Portman and Johnson cited the recent passage of the Obama-Coburn bill, which requires the creation of a searchable database of all federal contracts and grants, as one milestone of transparency. President Bush signed the bill into law in a ceremony held on the same day as the luncheon.
“As the president said this morning [at the bill signing], ‘You’ll now be able to Google your government,’” Portman said.
The administration’s final two years will also see a push on more competitive sourcing and better accountability through integrated, governmentwide financial management. But this will require culture change, Johnson said.
“You have to teach some old, medium and young dogs new tricks,” Johnson said.
A new study by the IBM Center, released at the luncheon, confirmed that government reform still has a ways to go.
“The current conduct of American government is a poor match for the problems it must solve,” wrote Donald Kettl, a University of Pennsylvania social sciences professor who contributed to the report.
This “poor match,” the study said, could be seen in various government failures over the past year, including the inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina and the FBI’s abandonment of an IT systems upgrade.
But the report did identify several trends that have begun to transform government, including President Bush’s call for a “market-based government” on taking office in 2001. So far, implementation of that concept has been spotty, the report said.
“His administration’s efforts have achieved limited success and are seen as politically controversial,” the report said. Given this, the report called for framing the issue in more non-ideological terms in the future.
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