| 摘要 | With the president’s signature on a new bipartisan deal raising the caps on appropriated spending for the next two fiscal years, it is now clear that the kind of direct attack on domestic discretionary spending proposed in his 2020 budget will never get approved by Congress, even when Republicans control both the House and Senate. The administration would have more success restraining spending if it emphasized improving government productivity instead of wholesale elimination of functions and agencies that powerful factions in Congress support.
That boosting government performance is less politically fraught than blunt cost-cutting does not mean it is easy. Since the 1960’s, presidents from both parties have launched various management initiatives to deliver improved services at less cost to taxpayers, with mixed results. One obstacle has been inconstancy. With each election, incoming personnel feel compelled to set aside what their predecessors put in place in favor of new approaches and priorities. Another barrier is Congress. The appropriations committees have shown little interest in using performance data to assess the value of domestic programs and agencies, which means the executive branch has less leverage to force changes on bureaucracies reluctant to part with old ways of conducting their operations.
These challenges are not confined to the U.S. Other advanced economies face similar problems, and are trying to address them in ways that mirror the efforts undertaken here.
The U.K. has been a global leader in integration of performance measurement with public budgeting. The Chancellor of the Exchequer and the civil servants in the Treasury have been using data-driven budget reviews to improve productivity since the early years of the Thatcher era. The processes have become more refined and routinized over the years, and more accepted throughout government. It helps that, in a parliamentary system, the Treasury’s budget decisions are less susceptible to being overturned by an independent legislature than is the case for executive branch in the U.S.
A recent report for the U.K. Treasury by the country’s leading expert on the subject — Sir Michael Barber — outlines a comprehensive vision for performance-based budgeting that may inform next steps for the current government or perhaps its successor. The Public Value Framework — Barber’s name for the blueprint — has universal applicability and is therefore useful for thinking about improving government performance in the U.S. too.
The basic orientation of the Public Value Framework, as with all performance initiatives, is toward tying government spending with measurable outcomes that matter to citizens. For some activities, performance measurement is a relatively straightforward exercise, while for others, it is more difficult to define. For instance, tax collection lends itself to outcome measures for which data can be collected rather easily. The goal should be to administer tax laws accurately and with the minimum burden on taxpayers and businesses. The Internal Revenue Service has an extensive and robust performance measurement system to monitor progress toward these broad goals. Other agencies, like the Social Security Administration, have similar lists of performance measures that allow managers to adjust business operations to produce more with less each year. It is harder to define appropriate outcome measures for something like federal student loans for higher education. Is the goal higher paying jobs for student loan recipients, better skills (if those can even be measured), or efficient administration of the loans? Many federal activities have goals that are equally hard to pinpoint, and also hard to measure.
That is not an excuse not to try, however. As the Barber report notes, if a governmental activity has no defensible metrics of how it contributes public value, it is in danger of losing support among elected officials and possibly also among voters.
The Public Value Framework uses a uniform, government-wide set of four criteria to grade how agencies and programs add public value, with green assigned to programs with good performance and red to those that are “highly problematic” for any number of reasons. In addition to measuring outcomes, the grading system assesses specific dimensions of each activity’s contribution to public value, such as an agency’s capacity to incorporate innovation into program operations, and fruitful engagement by agency officials with key stakeholders as a basis for findings and recommendations to improve.
During the George W. Bush administration, the Office of Management and Budget employed a rating system — the Performance Assessment Rating Tool, or PART — that resembles what is now recommended for the U.K. Over a five year period, the entire federal government went through a systematic review using this tool, and the results were used as a basis for making some resource allocation decisions as part of the administration’s annual budget submissions to Congress. The House and Senate showed less enthusiasm for the project, however, and the Obama administration chose to use a different approach with its management improvement efforts.
Although PART was set aside, referencing performance data has become a much more accepted feature of the federal budget process over the past twenty-five years. In 1993, Congress passed the Government Performance and Results Act, which requires all federal agencies to specify strategic goals and to issue annual reports showing measurable progress toward them. A 2011 law updated the statute and gave the executive branch new authority to pursue remedies for underperforming programs.
These laws are helpful but cannot substitute for persistent leadership by key officials and cooperation by Congress. The Trump administration has articulated an ambitious management agenda, but as with so many other initiatives launched since 2017, follow- through has been inconsistent.
The opportunity persists. The payoff from improved government performance could be substantial. The McKinsey Center for Government looked at best practices across governments in advanced economies and found that higher productivity in lower-performing countries could reduce costs by about 9 percent, with savings of trillions of dollars annually. The implication is that the Trump administration could pursue fiscal discipline in the discretionary slice of the budget not by eliminating programs it believes are expendable (although some certainly are expendable), but by aggressively driving higher performance from all governmental activity. It’s tough and largely thankless work, but it is far more likely to show financial returns in the form of better results for the same or fewer dollars than a quixotic effort to get Congress on board with an agenda focused on eliminating whole programs and agencies. |
