AGA Today
Looking for a
Route to Better Government
By Stephen Barr
The Washington Post
Thursday, March 1, 2007; D04
It's apparently
not too early to start thinking up ideas for how the next administration
can improve the government's management practices.
With the
presidential campaign field taking shape, think tanks and public-service
and business groups are preparing to develop policy proposals and ideas
for the winning candidate.
The IBM Center
for the Business of Government, for example, plans to launch an
"interactive conversation" today to help find ideas for the next White
House.
To start the
conversation, the District-based IBM Center hopes to prompt an online
discussion on issues raised in a new report, "Reflections on 21st
Century Management," written by professors Donald F. Kettl of the
University of Pennsylvania and Steven Kelman of Harvard University. The
Web address is
http://www.businessofgovernment.org/transition2008.
The Government
Performance Coalition, a group of organizations interested in management
issues, is sponsoring a Transitions in Governance 2008 Web site, in
hopes of helping shape the agenda for 2008 and beyond.
The group's
steering committee envisions the Web site (http://transitionsingov.org) as a way to get political campaigns, federal managers and
the public involved in defining management issues for the next
administration. A "transitions blog" is scheduled to go live today.
Jonathan D.
Breul, a former Office of Management and Budget executive, will be
heading up the Performance Coalition. In a bit of a coincidence, he
takes over the position of executive director at the IBM Center today,
replacing Mark. A. Abramson, who will continue as a consultant to the
center and reopen his own company.
Other
organizations, such as the Council for Excellence in Government, also
are making plans for the next presidential transition. Patricia
McGinnis, that group's president, said the council plans to take its
"Prune Book," an analysis of the plum jobs in government that require
experienced leadership, and move it to the Internet. "We want to push
out and reach a lot of people across the country," she said.
The council
plans to sponsor a series of discussions for career managers to prepare
them for what to expect during a transition, when a crop of new
political appointees arrive in Washington.
Thinking up new
ideas for improving government could be challenge, after almost 16 years
of "reinventing government" by the Clinton-Gore administration and the
Bush-Cheney team's "president's management agenda." Those initiatives
were met with some resistance from Congress and were greeted skeptically
by many federal employees who perceived them as efforts to downsize and
outsource government operations.
In recent
months, the government's efforts to improve the performance of programs
and the delivery of services has been overshadowed by the controversy
over the Iraq war, allegations of contract waste and fraud, and the
sluggish response by federal officials to Hurricane Katrina.
Still, the
federal government has taken what Kelman calls a "performance turn,"
driven by a 1993 law, the Government Performance and Results Act, that
has prodded agencies to show the public what it is getting for its tax
dollars. Efforts to link budgets to program performance measures also
have become more common, Kelman says.
The next
president, Kelman suggests, will take steps to increase the use of
performance management techniques, improve management of federal
contracts, and look at public-private partnerships and interagency
collaborations as ways of improving service to taxpayers.
But Kelman says
more research is needed to show that some of these efforts are more than
just a management fad and can make a difference in how agencies and
programs perform.
Kettl believes
the next president will face pressure to reshape the government so that
it can more quickly respond to what he calls "non-routine problems,"
such as terrorism, natural disasters and health emergencies.
The
government's most important problems "refuse to stay within the
boundaries of the government agencies established to solve them," Kettl
writes.
"New agencies
created to tackle the new generation of problems, like the federal
Department of Homeland Security, have struggled to find their footing."
he argues. "Even more important, they tend to be backward looking,
focused on solving the last set of problems rather than scanning the
environment for the next set of problems that must be solved."