ASPA Center for Accountability & Performance

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.

Performance Management Checklist

Barrett & Greene

Here’s a handy checklist of a dozen proven pieces of advice to improve your organization’s performance management system!

How You Count Matters!

Bloomberg News

Traffic death statistics in the US may be misleading. By emphasizing the number of people killed per mile rather than deaths per capita, traffic safety groups risk normalizing the factors that make American roads so deadly. 

Improving Federal Information Transparency

U.S. Government Accountability Office

Recent GAO testimony summarizes its work in four areas where improving information transparency in federal spending and programs. These include: federal spending, improper payments, program inventory, and FOIA request processing. 

Resource of the Week: Resources to Increase Your Impact

Performance.gov

The homepage for the federal government’s main performance website is fairly vacuous, but buried beneath it is a useful gold mine of references and playbooks to help improve agency and program performance.

2026 CAP Recognition Awards

Harry Hatry Distinguished Performance Management Practice Award – David Bernstein

Joseph Wholey Distinguished Scholarship Award – Ting Huang

Organizational Leadership Award – County Auditor’s Office, Multnomah County, Oregon

Emerging Leaders Award – Courtney Hall, Kylie Jackson, and Howard Waldie, IV

Easy Measures

Barrett & Greene

States and localities often measure their success, but too often they focus on data that’s easier to collect but may be less helpful in achieving a desired result.

OMB Backpedals on Risk Management

Federal News Network

The Office of Management and Budget released a revised Circular A-123 that de-emphasizes enterprise risk management, which had been added to this guidance to agencies on internal controls ten years ago. ERM is no longer the organizing principle and returns A-123 to a compliance orientation. Here’s a link to the final guidance; the article in FNN is a year old when the draft guidance was being circulated. Haven’t seen any more recent articles.

Accountability in Public Administration: From Concepts to Empirical Tests

Handbook of Accountability Research (2026)

Public accountability is a crucial element of democratic governance relating those with power to the democratic audiences for whom they govern. . . In recent years, accountability has become a major topic in public administration research for at least three major reasons.

Advancing Accountability in Unsettled Times

Public Performance & Management Review

A symposium at ASPA’s 2024 conference in Minneapolis, brought together more than 30 scholars from across the globe— resulting in a special issue of PPMR. On the surface, much appears unchanged. Yet, a closer look reveals that the intervening years have brought significant shifts—both in how accountability is studied within the discipline and in the real-world contexts of politics and public administration.

Making Metrics Matter for Local Governments

PATimes (Alex Tremblay)

Great mini-case study of Hennepin County, MN’s efforts to improve performance, noting: “performance improves not through targets and goals but through participation in a continuous quality improvement process at all levels of the organization.”

Resource of the Week: City Health Dashboard

NYU Grossman School of Medicine

The goal is to provide communities and city leaders with an array of regularly updated data specific to neighborhood and/or city boundaries – such as life expectancy, park access, and children in poverty – to improve the health and well-being of everyone in the community.