Congress' Lord Voldemort
When you want to lose weight, you track the number of pounds you lose each week. When parents want to know how their kids are doing in school, they look at their report cards. When board members want to know how their firm is doing, they look at the profits the firm earned. When Congress wants to know whether federal agencies are making progress toward their goals, they cover their ears and yell “Yah, yah, yah, I can’t hear you.” Actually, most federal agency managers think it’s just peachy that that’s the response because the last thing they want is accountability.
We have had performance accounting in place for the federal government since 1993. Various presidents and vice presidents have tried to actually make it work. Former VP Al Gore became famous for his “Golden Hammer” awards. President Bush’s team instigated his “Performance Assessment Rating Tool, PART, which the agency’s responded with “What PART of we don’t care are you not getting?”
Seth Harris, who was deputy Labor Secretary under President Obama tried to brief Congress on the Labor Department’s performance management. He wrote:
“How many congressional staff agreed to attend the briefing? Zero. Based on prior experience, I considered that response to be an accurate representation of their bosses’ interest in the topic.”
It doesn’t matter, Congress doesn’t need briefings on agency results to continue to shower them with riches. What would be nice would be if there were some way to know whether the money was spent on things that worked that taxpayers actually care about. Crazy things, like improving reading scores for students, reducing the ever growing weights of Americans, or even reducing the carbon footprint to slow global warming.
Bureaucrats aren’t known for being particularly innovative so we should help them to achieve these things, particularly when they get big new batches of money. What we generally see in agency requests for the next year’s funding is pretty much what they have had in previous years. They are creative in expanding their jurisdiction but not for having ideas that work. Part of the problem lies outside of the agencies; courts tend to defer to agencies who use precedents.
But we spend a lot of money on regulations, between $2 and $4 trillion each year (up to 20% of GDP). Presidents are simply outgunned when it comes to monitoring agencies and President Carter said, when the size of the administrative state was much smaller, “dealing with the federal bureaucracy…was worse than he anticipated.” So, it is up to Congress who, after, controls their budgets.
Unfortunately, in a book by a former beloved colleague of mine, Jerry Ellig, and two of this colleagues, he found that Congress not only didn’t care about whether or not agency’s accomplished anything, they actually don’t want to hear it. I know by raising this it may affect Congress’s disapproval rating of 71 percent. Don’t worry, 17 percent of likely U.S. voters love Congress although that may also be the percentage of the public who receive appropriations or friendly laws.
Another author of the performance book, Maurice McTigue, the former New Zealand Minister of Labor used to ask a question that is never asked in the U.S.
It is the Lord Voldemort performance question that Congress must not voice.
“When will you be done?”
As in, “you’ve been doing this same job for decades, spending billions of taxpayer dollars and causing consumers to spend many more billions to comply with the regulations, when can we expect you to declare some sort of victory and pack up and go home?”
Alas, there simply are no questions like that and, in fact, just holding them accountable for results was summed up by Obama’s brutally honest Deputy Labor Secretary,
“There are no consequences for an agency’s failure to comply [with performance laws] or for its poor performance. Budgets are not cut, and programs are not eliminated. Appropriations decisions in Congress are driven more by ideology and constituency politics than evidence. … There is no requirement that political appointees and senior career leaders suffer discipline for a failure to comply with GPRA or poor programmatic or departmental performance.”
But if we were to ask Congress to hold agencies accountable, it might also mean we would start holding Congress accountable if they didn’t hold agencies accountable.
And that is exactly why it is a subject that shall not be named.