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tough but important questions about exactly what we want government doing and how we should structure government to best accomplish those missions.”
In an April 12 statement, J. David Cox, national president of the American Federation of Govern- ment Employees, praised the idea of reinventing government but said using contractors to do it was a bad approach that would outsource gov- ernment jobs to “costly and unac- countable contractors.”
“The federal government already spends twice as much annually on ser- vice contractors as it does on its own workforce,” Cox said. “Nobody knows precisely what these contractors do, how well they do it, who they’re hiring or where they’re working,”
Tony Reardon, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, called the guidance “little more than opening the door to increased con- tracting out of agency functions and services” at the expense of federal workers who are being squeezed out by shrinking budgets.
“Requiring government agencies to draft detailed plans for downsizing based on a budget that has yet to be released, let alone gone through the congressional appropriations process, is a wasteful exercise,” he added.
Federal executives will have to do a tricky dance to support the White House order while waiting to see how Congress responds to the fiscal 2018 budget submission that is due out in May.
“Savvy, experienced managers are going to earn their keep responding to this and all the other balls that are in the air,” said Robert Shea, a principal at Grant Thornton and former associate director for administration and govern- ment performance at OMB.
Gerton agreed that the budget ques- tion “adds an element of uncertainty” to what is being asked of agencies. “There’s a gulf of disconnect between what Congress is saying it thinks about the skinny budget and what it is,” she said. n
Can data and evidence drive spending cuts?
The topline message from the White House to agencies in an April 12 memo was clear enough: It’s time for big cuts in the federal civilian workforce and in public- facing government programs.
The Office of Management and Budget guidance sets a schedule for agencies to deliver proposals for eliminating or combining programs or for devolving them to state and local entities or the private sector. But beyond a few guidelines for analysis, OMB leaves flexibility for agencies to justify how they made their decisions and what evidence they used in their deliberations.
An appendix to the OMB memo that was not released publicly offers a list
of data sources to use.They include oversight reports from inspectors general and the Government Accountability Office, existing agency plans and strategic reviews, reports from communities of interest such as the CIO Council, federal employee surveys, and “rigorous studies from outside the federal government of the strategies/interventions that are used in a given federal program, even if the study is not specifically about that federal program.”
However, there is no consensus among policymakers and government managers on how to use data and evidence to make determinations about whether a program is effective or not.
That issue is one of the reasons Congress established the U.S. Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking in 2016.The organization is scheduled to submit a report to the White House and Congress in September.
According to commission member Robert Shea, a former OMB executive and now a principal at GrantThornton, the group is still grappling with some foundational issues.
“What does ‘evidence’ mean?” Shea asked. “What’s the difference between data and evidence? How should evidence be used? What capacity is necessary for a mature organization to leverage data and evidence?”
Part of the problem is that outcomes in the public sector can be a bit amorphous. In the private sector, one can measure profit. In the public sector, there’s no clear metric for gauging the value of investments in programs.
“It’s rare that a program has good outcome data,” Shea said. “And rarer still that they have good cost data associated with those outcomes. But even if they did, subjecting those programs to rigorous evaluations — basically isolating the activities of those programs from other factors — tells a different story from simple performance data.”
Andrew Feldman, a former Obama administration official who is now a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, said he expects common ground to emerge from the commission’s work.
“Success, in my opinion, means recommending changes that go beyond incremental reforms,” Feldman told FCW. He said the commission has a rare opportunity to look at the big picture of policymaking and ask, “What should the world look like if government and researchers and stakeholders used evidence and data to their full capacity?”
Still, the vision of a data-driven government is a bit different from a blanket call for cuts.
“If the administration frames evidence as only a tool for cutting, than agencies will quickly sour on doing more evaluation,” Feldman said. “It’s too early to tell how OMB will proceed, but hopefully they will take a page from the private sector, where you use data and evidence to scale up what works, highlight areas where you need more research and stop doing what isn’t working.”
Agencies are due to file their preliminary plans for reform and personnel reductions with OMB by June 30, with final plans to come in the fiscal 2019 budget submissions in September.
— Adam Mazmanian
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