H.R. 185 — Program Assessment and Results Act POSITION: We OPPOSE this bill. Description Rep. Todd Platts (R-PA) reintroduced the Program Assessment and Results Act (the “PAR Act” or “PARA”), which would authorize the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to assess the performance of all federal programs at least every five years — or even more frequently for some programs, at OMB’s discretion. Packaged in the notionally uncontroversial principle that budgeting decisions should be informed by performance appraisals, the PAR Act would effectively endorse OMB’s existing performance review program, make those controversial assessments a permanent fixture in government policy, and contribute to corporate special interests’ campaign to reduce regulation through paralysis by analysis. Platts’ bill would amend GPRA and essentially subsume the PART. PARA would require OMB to work with agency heads “to the maximum extent practicable” to select which programs will be subjected to performance reviews in a given year and conduct the reviews. PARA requires all programs to be reviewed at least once every five years, although OMB and the agencies can determine “higher priorit[ies],” “special circumstances,” observed improvements, or other factors warranting more frequent reviews for selected programs. The OMB director would be authorized to produce criteria for selecting programs and guidance for conducting reviews. H.R. 185 does improve slightly upon its predecessor in the 108th Congress by requiring OMB to announce, 90 days in advance of the release of PARA reports, a list of programs picked for review and the criteria to be used in conducting the reviews. OMB would be required to provide for some sort of notice and comment for the program list and the review criteria. Other provisions would address performance reviews that depend upon classified information and classify the reviews as “inherently governmental functions” that cannot be contracted to the private sector. The PAR Act would at least assert some congressional authority over the existing practice of PART reviews, which are not currently authorized by any statute. Even so, that authority is only a formality, because the bill supplies no substantive standards against which to hold OMB accountable or to restrain the exercise of OMB’s discretion. The new version of PARA addresses several of the concerns of the Democratic opposition in the 108th Congress, among them a notice-and-comment provision, incorporating agencies themselves in the performance reviews, and a specific provision for handling confidential information. A larger problem remains: that PARA would add to the many analytical burdens that divert increasingly limited resources to “navel gazing” instead of real action to meet public needs. As these burdens — detailed in this law review commentary — are multiplied, regulatory policy runs into the problem of paralysis by analysis. If ensuring the effectiveness of and need for government programs actually were a priority, then these analyses would build in self-checks that stop to review the analyses themselves and assess their actual usefulness. This problem is replicated in PARA, which assumes that performance measurement and related management decisions are inherently valuable enterprises that need never be reviewed for their consequences for the public interest. Finally, PARA — which is part of a larger trend in the direction of imposing corporate-style outcome- and performance-based management techniques in the public and nonprofit sectors — perpetuates the myth of the perfectly efficient corporate machine. As news reports accumulate revealing accounting scandals, suppression of science and false advertising of harmful products, graft, insider trading, obscene CEO pay-outs unrelated to corporate performance, and board/executive collusions, corporate special interests have been toppling from their undeserved heights. It should be clear by now that the corporate sector is driven by values that are fundamentally incompatible with the values which should govern policy makers charged with serving the public interest. The PAR Act does have a worthwhile goal — improving government — but it threatens to confound its own goal.