Robert B. Denhardt

Robert B. Denhardt is Professor in the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University and Visiting Scholar at the University of Delaware. Dr. Denhardt is a Past President of the American Society for Public Administration, and the founder and first chair of ASPA's National Campaign for Public Service, an effort to assert the dignity and worth of public service across the nation. He is also a member of the prestigious National Academy of Public Administration and a Fellow of the Canadian Centre for Management Development.

Is Performance Budgeting Hopeless?

A recent academic symposium on performance-based budgeting suggests that trying to apply this noble idea across government may be hopeless.

Decades of research and efforts to implement performance budgeting across federal, state, and local governments in the U.S. seem to consistently come down to the conclusion that no matter how rational it sounds, politicians don’t want to use it to make decisions.

Starlings, Transparency, and Thad Allen

Complexity theory and complex adaptive systems are relatively new ventures in the field of public administration, but they are old hat in other academic disciplines such as physics and biology.

So what did I learn?

A High Performance Government

While Jonathan Breul is attending the IRMCO Conference in Cambridge, Maryland, I’m attending the annual conference of the American Society for Public Administration in San Jose, California. I understand it’s sunny in Cambridge. . . it’s rainy in San Jose!

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.