Implementing the Recovery Act: The Blog

The Recovery Act is quietly influencing federal-state-local relations.  Not only is the money being used to save jobs as states and localities cut back their budgets, but the ways states and localities are choosing to use and report on the funds are creating different ways for getting “the business of government” done.

In an essay for the IBM Center, George Mason University professor Paul Posner describes this as “an accountability test” for the federal system.  He talks about new governance models in addition to the new reporting requirements imposed by the Recovery Act.

But since things are changing so fast in the Recovery Act arena, the IBM Center is experimenting with new ways of keeping up with what is going on.  So rather than just rely on research reports, the Center is now sponsoring a new blog — focused on what is happening with the implementation of the Recovery Act – at the state level.  This blog is being written by two well-regarded journalists who have focused on state and local management happening for several decades – Katherine Barrett and Richard Greene.

Recent topics on their Recovery Act blog:

• Improving the data quality of reports to the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board.

• An interview with Beth Blauer, who heads Maryland’s  well-regarded Recovery Act command center.

• Rankings of the state stimulus websites.

Barrett and Greene are interviewing dozens of officials at the federal and state levels on what is going on, how the monies are being used, and what the actual impact is on-the-ground.   We hope you enjoy their blog and include its RSS feed in your daily reading!

Framing a Public Management Research Agenda

The IBM Center for The Business of Government hosted a forum in November 2009 to examine the Obama Administration’s themes for a high-performing government and to frame a public management research agenda.

Participants included nearly 50 of the nation’s top public management researchers, scholars, and distinguished practitioners.  The forum was an effort to help bridge the gap between research and practice, and to collectively develop a research agenda that would help government executives move things forward.

The forum was organized around key management priorities reflected in the Obama Administration’s early months in office.  To inform participants in the forum, the IBM Center invited four scholars to each prepare a discussion paper providing context and issues related to one of these priorities.  These draft papers were shared in advance with participants and they formed the foundation for the conversations during the forum.  Authors used the feedback from the participants in revising their papers, which are summarized in subsequent blog entries.  In addition, participants helped develop a series of research questions they thought would be useful to both researchers and practitioners over the next few years.  These are also reflected in the following blog entries.

Noted public management scholar Michael Barzelay has written that “knowledge building is much more of a team sport than contributors to the current literature seem to appreciate.”

With this in mind, we are hopeful that the following topics, and their associated research questions, can help foster such team play by all of those involved in and committed to improving government performance.

Topic 1:  A New Performance Improvement and Analysis Framework (by Kathryn Newcomer, George Washington University)

Topic 2:  The Recovery Act:  An Accountability Test for Our Federal System (by Paul Posner, George Mason University)

Topic 3:  Federal Contracting and Acquisition (by Steven Schooner, George Washington University)

Topic 4:  Transparency, Technology, and Participatory Democracy (by Joseph Goldman, AmericaSpeaks)

More on Senate Performance Hearing

Yesterday I highlighted Jeff Zients’ testimony before the Senate Budget Committee’s Task Force on Government Performance.  But there were two other witnesses who provided some interesting insights, and Senator Mark Warner offered a glimpse of where the Task Force might be heading.

Sir Michael Barber, who led the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit under Tony Blair, described how Blair created and used the Delivery Unit after he was re-elected in 2001.   “Its mission was to secure delivery of about 20 major domestic policy priorities, selected by the Prime Minister in consultation with his cabinet colleagues,” he began.

Barber said the 20 priority areas focus on issues that were most important to citizens, such as reducing crime and ensuring punctuality of the railway, and that were clearly measurable.  He described how targets were set, agency and program “delivery plans” were drawn up, and a routine of regular reports and problem-solving meetings was used to ensure action.

Paul Posner, president of the American Society for Public Administration and a former senior official at the Government Accountability Office, talked about the staying power of the concept of performance budgeting and how it has evolved over the past four decades.  He said that the Budget Committee could put in place a performance assessment process that could lay the groundwork for making performance-based budget choices. 

He noted that “the ability of policymakers to conduct such an annual review process is circumscribed by the structure of the budget process itself.”  For example, tradeoffs between spending programs and tax expenditures cannot happen.  So a housing grant and a home tax credit cannot be considered together in the budget process because these “policy tools” are “owned” by different congressional committees with different jurisdictions. 

He suggested “The Budget Committee Task Force might start by doing selective assessments of the portfolio of programs addressing common outcomes across the government,” such as programs related to food safety or low income housing.  He noted: “The Budget Committee is ideally positioned to lead the way in undertaking these crosscutting assessments” and that it has “the ability to use outcomes as the great unifier.”

Senator Warner observed that the British seem to have a better ability to reach across programs and outcomes than the US.  Sir Michael noted that while the Prime Minister does have authority to do so, he created cabinet committees around each of the 20 outcome areas, designated a lead minister, and gave each cabinet committee a budget to help coordinate action. The Parliament has little to do with this, but in the US any similar process would require a greater role for the legislative branch.

Senator Warner said his Task Force would undertake a “mapping” of programs, agencies, and congressional committees that touch upon a policy arena, and that the Task Force would select and map two or three policy areas as “proof of concept” pilots.  He got the agreement of OMB’s Zients to help, as well.

Next step – selecting the policy arenas!