Tools of Control? Comparing Congressional and Presidential Performance Management Reforms
Kroll, Alex and Donald P. Moynihan. 2020. Tools of Control? Comparing Congressional and Presidential Performance Management Reforms. Public Administration Review
40 Pages Posted: 17 Nov 2020
Date Written: September 30, 2020
Abstract
Presidents are claimed to have a stronger interest in an effective bureaucracy than Congress, because they must be responsive to the public as a whole rather than narrow interests. We examine this claim in the context of multiple waves of US performance management reforms: the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993, the Program Assessment Rating Tool (2002-2008) and the GPRA Modernization Act of 2010. Using four waves of federal employee surveys spanning 17 years, we measure reform success as employees‟ purposeful use of performance data as a result of being exposed to routines embedded in the reforms. We find that the legislative-led GPRAMA is associated with more purposeful data use on aggregate, while the PART executive reform succumbed to a partisan pattern of implementation. Statutory reforms are less likely to be experienced as ideological tools than executive branch reforms used by the President to impose control over agencies.
Keywords: performance management; GPRAMA; Obama; performance information use; politicization
JEL Classification: H1, H83
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
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