The House Government Reform Committee favorably reported out of committee the Program Assessment and Results Act, a bill that would have the effect of codifying the administration's controversial tool for rating program effectiveness. The bill is expected to move to the House floor this spring. The committee voted 18-14 to send the bill to the House floor during a March 10 markup session, after rejecting every amendment offered by committee Democrats. The bill requires the Office of Management and Budget, working with federal agencies, to assess programs at least every five years. OMB is to develop the criteria for assessing programs as well as which programs to evaluate. At least three months before completing the assessments, OMB is to post to its website and send to Congress a list of the programs to be reviewed and the criteria to be used in assessing the program. OMB is to establish a process for allowing the public to comment on the OMB list and criteria. The results of the performance review are to be published in the president's annual budget submission to Congress. The bill largely codifies a controversial procedure OMB started a few years ago, called the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART). The PART has proven to be a controversial tool. The OMB budget "desk officers" have too much authority and too little experience to properly evaluate a program, and they often judge programs based on criteria that directly contravene the statutory basis for the programs. For example, OMB budget officers criticized the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for failing to use cost-benefit analysis when crafting regulatory protections for workers' health and safety, even though the Occupational Safety and Health Act and Supreme Court precedent have forbidden the use of cost-benefit analysis. Block grants in particular have suffered from PART, even though the fundamental idea of block granting - sending funds to the states with no strings attached - is incompatible with PART's use of uniform federal criteria for assessing the effectiveness of the states' use of block grants. In a lengthy statement at the markup, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) described the failures of the White House's PART, which purports to measure agency effectiveness but often uses measures that directly contradict the law governing an agency's work. Waxman offered an amendment to address the gap between measures and purpose and to harmonize the Program Assessment and Results Act (PARA) with the Government Performance and Results Act, the underlying statute that the PARA will amend, by having agencies rather than OMB determine the measures to be used for assessing performance. The amendment failed, 15 to 16. Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-NY) offered an amendment to have OMB put public notice in the Federal Register, rather than just a posting on the OMB website, soliciting comment on the programs to be measured and the criteria to be used. The Towns amendment would also have inserted a sunset clause, so that later there can be an assessment of the results from the results measurement initiative itself. The Towns amendment failed on a 15-17 vote, but Rep. Todd Platts (R-PA), the sponsor of the bill, indicated his willingness to work on a sunset clause, possibly for a manager's amendment when the bill goes to the House floor. The bill is expected to go to a floor vote in the first week of April. See more information on the PARA and PART.