ASPA Center for Accountability & Performance

Federal Agencies’ Strategic Plans Now Available

U.S. General Services Administration

Agency Strategic Plans for 2022-2026 are available now and can be viewed from the Performance.gov homepage by clicking “Agencies” at the top of the page and selecting a specific agency from the dropdown menu. Also available are agencies’ priority goals and their first-ever set of learning agendas.

Delivering High Performance Government

U.S. Office of Management and Budget

This chapter from the Analytical Perspectives volume accompanying the President’s Budget provides an overview of the Federal Government’s Performance Framework approach to performance man­agement and its application by the Administration to improve outcomes in delivering a high-performance Government. It’s a terrific synthesis of what is going on, management-wise.

Building and Using Evidence to Improve Government Effectiveness

U.S. Office of Management and Budget

This chapter from the Analytical Perspectives volume accompanying the President’s Budget provides an overview of the Federal Government’s commitment to promoting a culture of evidence. It provides a statutory background and specific policy and spending commitments in the coming year.

Career reflections from an evidence leader

GovInnovator (Andy Feldman)

In his 200^th interview, Andy Feldman is joined by one of the most respected people within the evidence and evaluation field, Dr. Naomi Goldstein, to share reflections on her 21-year career at the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) at the U.S. Department of Human Services. She is the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Planning, Research, and Evaluation at ACF. She will retire from federal service this week after a 21-year tenure at ACF.

Awards for Local Government Performance Audit Reports – 2021

Association of Local Government Auditors

The Knighton Awards recognize the best performance audit reports of the year. The following reports were recognized for their excellence for calendar year 2021. Some great examples of well-prepared reports by different-sized audit shops!

Resource of the Week:  Federal Agency Performance Dashboard

The Partnership for Public Service has created a dashboard that offers a snapshot of agency operations in an easily digestible visual format. The dashboard includes personnel numbers, employee demographics, political appointments, employee engagement scores, and social media engagement. About half the data will be updated automatically daily.

The Center for Accountability and Performance (CAP) conducted its Virtual CAP Awards Ceremony on Wednesday, March 30, 2022.  Prior to Covid-19, these awards would have been presented in person at the ASPA Annual Conference.

The CAP Chair and each of the Award Chairs presented the 2022 Awards as follows:

The Harry Hatry Distinguished Performance Management Practice Award — John M. Kamensky

Richard Greene and Rakesh Mohan, Award Co-Chairs

The Joseph Wholey Distinguished Scholarship Award — Sounman Hong

Elaine Lu, Award Chair

The CAP Organizational Leadership Award — The New Mexico Legislative Finance Committee 

Monica Croskey Chaparro and Katherine Barrett, Award Co-Chairs

The CAP Emerging Leaders Award of Excellence — Jaime Lees, Arlington County Government, VA; Rudy de Leon Dinglas, The Johns Hopkins Center for Government Excellence, MD; Haley Kadish, City of Albuquerque, NM; and Tim Moreland, City of Chattanooga, TN.

Michael Jacobson, Award Chair

Congratulations to each of the 2022 CAP Award Recipients for their outstanding contributions and service to their communities and to the field of performance management.  (See “Awards” from the Menu for a more detailed Summary of the 2022 CAP Awards)

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Senate Bill Aims to Improve Federal Coordination with States and Localities

RouteFifty
New legislation sponsored by Sen. Gary Peters, a Michigan Democrat, would require two federal entities, the Office of Management and Budget and the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, to develop a strategic plan to increase coordination between the federal government and state, local and tribal governments.

Managing for Motivation as a Public Performance Improvement Strategy

Center for International Development, Harvard University (Dan Honig)

People management has an important role to play in improving public agency performance. This paper argues that a ‘Route Y’ managerial approach focused on supporting the empowered exercise of employee judgment will in many circumstances prove superior to conventional reform approaches steeped in ‘Route X’ monitoring and incentives. Returns to Route Y are greater when employees are or can become more “mission motivated” – that is, aligned with the goals of the agency in the absence of monitoring and extrinsic incentives.

Data Literacy for the Public Sector: Lessons from Early Pioneers in the U.S.

Data Foundation

Looking across the ten pioneers discussed in this report, nine key lessons emerged that are relevant for government agencies as they design data literacy capacity and programs.

Resource of the Week:  ARP Data and Evidence Dashboard (Results for America)

The American Rescue Plan includes a $350 billion investment in states and localities to make key investments in people and infrastructure. How is that money being spent by more than 19,000 units of government? The US Treasury requires recipient reports on plans and uses . This dashboard summarizes and displays data from more than 200 publicly available Recovery Plan Performance Reports from states and large localities.

Colorado’s “Evidence Continuum” Promotes Efficient, Effective Programs

Pew Charitable Trust, Results First

Colorado is a leader among states using data and research to strengthen their budget investment choices. Since 2014, it has applied research evidence to fund programs that work. For example, the state’s Office of State Planning and Budgeting requires evidence in an agency’s budget requests for changes to program funds, including expansions, reductions, and new projects.

“Significant Progress” Can Mean Allowing More Road Deaths

Washington Post

Half of states set goals for more people to die in crashes. Twenty-one planned for more pedestrians and cyclists to be hurt or killed. . . . The goals are part of a target-setting system that federal transportation officials devised in 2016 to measure what the public is getting for tens of billions of dollars from Washington that states spend each year. But by permitting targets that involve lower levels of performance, it has allowed states to do worse while still being labeled as making “significant progress” — a designation thatavoids consequences such as limits on how money can be spent.

Federal Billions and a Lost World of Accountability

Governing (Donald Kettl)

The stimulus program that followed the Great Recession was a model for tracking projects and spending down to the ZIP code level. We don’t have that with the American Rescue Plan, dooming us to fight about what matters most.

Portland’s New Review of Its Audit Recommendations

Barrett & Greene

Many audit offices do reviews of recommendations and the city of Portland, Oregon has just done a notable job by creating a visual dashboard comparing how agencies responded to recommendations made by City Auditor Mary Hull Caballero through 2021.

The Promise of Program Budgeting (Webinar, April 7)

ResourceX

There are many reasons to consider adopting program budgeting, but perhaps the most important is its ability to create a more transparent budget and budget development process. A program budget shows precisely what the government does and how much it costs.

Resource of the Week:  Centers for Civic Impact

The Centers for Civic Impact at Johns Hopkins University hosts three performance-related initiatives.  (1) The Center for Government Excellence, which provides coaching and technical assistance to city governments and nonprofits; (2) the GovEx Academy, which provides training and education; and (3) the Center for Applied Public Research, which supports evidence-based research and its application.

Problems with Performance Reporting: A Vermont Critique

Barrett & Greene

Here’s an investigative report by Douglas Hoffer, the Vermont State Auditor, about Vermont’s Annual Outcome Report. At the bottom of this blog post, you’ll see a short video in which Hoffer addresses his complaints with his state’s outcomes report. . . There are quite a few of them.

Atlanta Officers Scored on Level of Arrests

CBS News Channel 46

Channel 46 Investigates takes a look inside what some are calling an incentive system that encourages Atlanta police officers to arrest more people.

Announcing a New Initiative: The City Data Alliance

Bloomberg Cities Network

The Bloomberg Philanthropies City Data Alliance will identify 100 cities that are the most sophisticated, ambitious, and advanced at harnessing data and help them set a new standard for local governments committed to using data to power better results for residents.

China’s Disciplinary Enforcers Shift Focus from Corruption to Poor Performance

South China Morning Post

ChinChina’s President Xi Jinping is increasingly using the Communist Party’s disciplinary mechanisms, best known for tackling corruption, to punish poor performance, a study has found.

Resource of the Week:  Pew-MacArthur Results First Initiative

The Results First initiative works with states to implement an innovative evidence-based policymaking approach that helps them invest in policies and programs that are proved to work. This project is co-sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the MacArthur Foundation.

Meet the “Nudgers” – Pushing Behavioral Science to New Levels

Bloomberg Cities Network

Many city leaders took what they learned [about the uses of behavioral insights] and are now seeding it more deeply into their organizations. . . . Bloomberg Cities caught up with four people leading these efforts in U.S. city halls to learn more about how they’re using nudges in local government and what they’ve learned along the way. 

Four Ways to Make Data Work Better for Residents

Results for America

“Rather than try to overhaul their entire data infrastructure in a single pass, local governments can look to their peers for smaller, more attainable ways to improve their data practices. ”

Auditor’s 2021Annual Accountability Report

City of Portland (OR)

The year 2021 may best be described as one of endurance and reflection. . . . Community groups and leaders embraced our recommendations and joined our call for better, more equitable government.  

Tennessee Creates New System to Track Procurement Diversity

GovTech

Tennessee’s Governor’s Office of Diversity Business Enterprise (Go-DBE) launched dashboards last week to report contracting diversity spend and increase transparency around this data. . . . There is a public-facing dashboard that will be updated weekly as well as internal, agency-specific dashboards to track metrics related to increasing minority group participation in the government contracting process.

Shared Measures: Collective Performance Data Use in Collaborations

Alexander Kroll, Cambridge University Press (book)

Traditionally, performance metrics and data have been used to hold organizations accountable. This case study of collaboratives in North Carolina that were established to develop community responses to the opioid epidemic. It explains the use of shared performance measures in collaborative settings.

Resource of the Week:  Leap of Reason Initiative

The Leap of Reason Initiative is aimed at inspiring and supporting great leaders and funders in the nonprofit and foundation communities to build great organizations for greater societal impact by creating meaningful, measurable, and sustainable improvements in the lives of individuals, families, and communities. Its website contains numerous resources and a framework in which implementation can take place.