Performance Management

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.

The Urban Institute has launched a new web resource to explain Pay for Success, which it says is various forms of performance-based contracting used to support the delivery of targeted, high-impact preventative social services where an intervention at an early stage can reduce the need for higher-cost services in the future. Pay for Success funding systems can take many different forms and already operate in different policy arenas.

What sparked his imagination?  Here’s a link to the hearing record.

Lead off witnesses included Chief Performance Officer Jeff Zients and Comptroller General Gene Dodaro (who Carper jokingly referred to as Zients’ “wingman”).  Here are some testimony highlights from Zients:

Executive Branch Implementation Steps To Date. 

A Pipe Dream? 

President Obama’s February 2011 directive, “Administrative Flexibility, Lower Costs, and Better Results for State, Local, and Tribal Governments” instructed agencies to identify opportunities to streamline, reduce, or eliminate administrative requirements imposed on states and localities, and develop a plan of action in 180 days (August 26).  I summed it up in an earlier blog post.  OMB was to produce guidanc

We had no idea what he was talking about when he was describing the Virtual Department of Mary Washington (one of his constituents when he was the senator from Tennessee).  But he was just ahead of his time (and clearly ahead of where the federal government was in the early 1990s).  Since then, several countries have tried to create virtual agencies, most notably Canada, Australia, and Belgium.