ASPA Center for Accountability & Performance

Understanding Performance Management from the Bottom-Up

Public Administration Review (Leif Kongsgaard; Open Access PDF)

This article provides a cutting-edge perspective of how frontline employees and managers respond to a robust performance management system in terms of their reactions to “numbers” from the point of view of their emotions, attitudes, and actions. The research is based on rich empirical data and interviews with employees in the Danish public employment services.

Making Oversight Work

Niskanen Center (Anna Heetderks)

It’s just not all about cost savings. One of the areas in which oversight entities are well-positioned to influence agencies for the better is in their ability to provide candid, evidence-based assessments of how well agency programs are working. Oversight can essentially function as an impact evaluation team, communicating what’s working in a program and what isn’t. Realizing this potential requires changes in oversight practices in six areas.

Measuring the Hidden Workforce

Barrett & Greene 

While many government entities have performance management systems in place to measure the success or failure of the work that’s done in house, this can be trickier when it comes to the contractors and consultants who are sometimes referred to as the “hidden workforce.”

Closing the Loop

Federation of American Scientists Amanda Girard)

The federal government has a feedback-loop problem. Information and artifacts alone don’t necessarily facilitate learning and adaptation; strengthening federal feedback loops requires embedding translation and use into decision-making from the start. 

WEBINAR: Can Budgeting be Based on Performance? (Tues., Apr 28, 1 p.m. Eastern)

Center for Accountability & Performance (free)

New AI-driven tools may make it easier for governments to track performance in real-time, lowering the administrative burden of linking budgets to performance. Panelists include Marc Holzer, Katherine Willoughby and Kimberly Mernieks, director of Ohio’s Office of Management and Budget.

Translating Performance Management into Action

Barrett & Greene (Rudy de Leon Dinglas)

Adoption of a performance management system is only the first step. Based on observations of dozens of cases, success depends on leadership commitment, managerial authority, organizational capacity, and organizational cohesion. 

Mitigating Metrics Malaise

Eating Policy (Jen Pahlka)

Goodhart’s Law (when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure) is one of the deepest traps in organizational life, and the leaders who handle it best tend to share six recognizable instincts.

Accountability Without Authority

LinkedIn (Alexander Spradling)

Everyone wants accountability, but there is a principle that many organizations consistently violate, often without noticing: accountability without authority is unfair. And if accountability and authority are not aligned, then the mismatch erodes trust, distorts behavior, and poisons the decision-making process.

Using AI in Strategic Foresight

Public Administration Review (Open Access PDF)

Generating strategic foresight for public organizations is a resource intensive effort. A case study of an innovative effort in an Australian state government shows that AI can significantly help, when balanced with human expertise for validation and oversight.

Measuring What Matters in NonProfits

PATimes (Savanna Batson)

Nonprofits are increasingly called on to provide empirical evaluation of their impact to meet expectations for efficiency and accountability from board members, philanthropy and government-funded programs. As a result, proactively developing impact evaluation metrics serves as a critical strategy for organizational development.

Call for Papers: Research to Reinvigorate the Performance Movement

Public Performance & Management Review

This symposium seeks to critically assess the state of performance research and its connection to practice, with the aim of reinvigorating the performance movement intellectually and practically. “We invite scholars and practitioners to revisit foundational commitments, critique current trajectories, and articulate future pathways. What might a reinvigorated performance movement look like—and what kind of research, networks, and praxis might sustain it?” Submissions due: August 15, 2026

Resource of the Week:  Oversight Matters

Substack/”For 250 More”

“Oversight Matters” is a recurring feature of the For 250 More Substack that highlights important developments across the oversight community, so that we can strengthen public understanding, support accountability, and help readers see how these institutions shape the integrity of government every day.

When Data Challenges You to Change

Barrett & Greene (Michael Jacobson)

Over a decade, King County, WA (Seattle) decided to gather data from community members about their priorities and our employees about their engagement. What we found changed our approach to what to measure and how to prioritize our work and offers lessons on how to let the data inform decisions, strategy, and the way to do your work.

Outcome-Based Contracting in the US Government

IBM Center for The Business of Government

For years, federal agencies have been encouraged to shift their acquisition strategies from buying activities to buying results—yet the distance between aspiration and execution remains wide. This report addresses that gap.

The McNamara Fallacy of Metrics

Substack (Jono Hey)

The McNamara Fallacy is a belief in easy-to-measure quantitative metrics at the expense of ignoring hard-to-measure qualitative factors.

FY24 Federal Program Inventory Created Using AI

We The Doers (April Harding)

OMB has failed, for 15 years, to produce a complete federal program inventory (FPI). This demo shows a federal program inventory that OpenAI produced in one day. It has a rational structure with a more complete data framework than the official FPI, because this one is designed to answer: “What does the government actually do, and how does it apply our tax dollars to do that?”

Resource of the Week:  New Federal Evidence-Based Legislative Inventory

Results for America

You can view the real-time status of every bill, filter by issue area and see where bills include evidence-related provisions. The inventory helps lawmakers and their staff draft new evidence-based bills, reintroduce existing bills, and find model language to guide federal investment in effective solutions for the American people.

The Futures Mandate: How to Embed Foresight in Governance

Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies

This brief provides a good overview of international trends in addressing the challenge of planning for the long term, starting with the 2024 UN Summit of the Future and examples of what different countries around the globe are doing  to “put the future to work.”

Link Between Human Capital and Government Performance: 15 Questions

Public Performance & Management Review (Mary Guy)

When it comes to public performance, the importance of human capital cannot be overstated. Without human capital, no amount of financial capital can maintain a democracy and execute the public will. While there are many more questions that could be enumerated, the fifteen provided here serve to get the process started. 

Beyond the Data

Barrett & Greene

A wish: “After the heavy number crunching is done, we’d like academics to have a handful of discussions with experts in the field to see how they would interpret the information they’ve gathered.”

Resource of the Week:  ArundelStat, Bi-Annual Report 2026

Anne Arundel County, MD

This publication covers initiatives undertaken within Anne Arundel County government by the county’s ArundelStat Team. Initiatives cover projects, department-by-department performance, and the county’s commitment to OpenData. These include a Community Wellbeing Index and a “Hate Bias Incident Dashboard.” It also provides links to the ArundelStat website and community engagement newsletter.