If government efficiency sounds like an oxymoron to you, we understand. For all the talk of performance measurements, audits and transparency, government at the highest levels remains big, unwieldy and entrenched in old, opaque ways of doing business.
So when President-elect Barack Obama announced on Wednesday the creation of a new, high-level White House position to ensure agency accountability, skepticism was in order. Sure, Obama picked the highly skilled and apparently savvy Nancy Killefer to be the nation’s first “chief performance officer,” and vowed to get rid of programs that don’t work and improve ones that do.
We suspect, though, that Obama will soon find that’s much easier said than done. He’d better be ready to give Killefer the backing she’ll need to succeed. She’ll be butting heads with some entrenched and powerful interests — including some in Obama’s own Cabinet — that will fight hard to save their treasured programs, and it will take a strong-willed president to eliminate the ones that need to go.
Performance measurements aren’t new, of course, even to government. Some programs have proven useful, such as Snohomish County’s SnoStat accountability system and Gov. Chris Gregoire’s Government Management Accountability and Performance effort. State performance audits, mandated by Washington voters, are offering some good guidance on how agencies can spend tax dollars and deliver services more effectively.
But there’s room for improvement in how performance is measured, and Killefer must set a new standard — for her own success and for others to follow. In Wednesday’s Washington Post, Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, had some good suggestions for Obama and his new performance chief. Among them:
— Keep it simple by focusing on a limited number of things to measure, making sure they’re useful to managers and don’t just create more paperwork.
— Make data transparent and accessible, releasing data to the public in understandable ways so good ideas for improvement can be offered.
— Most importantly, make this a presidential priority. Obama’s entire leadership team, Stier emphasized, must prioritize this new way of doing business and hold agency and program managers accountable for measuring performance.
Obama noted Wednesday that without serious improvements in government efficiency, trillion-dollar deficits could become commonplace. Performance must improve for this nation to reach its potential — or, frankly, to survive over the long haul.
Obama’s first steps are good ones. The harder ones are still to come.
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