Tools of Control? Comparing Congressional and Presidential Performance Management Reforms

In: Public administration review: PAR, Band 81, Heft 4, S. 599-609

Abstract

AbstractPresidents 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 U.S. performance management reforms: the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) of 1993, the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART ) (2002–2008), and the GPRA Modernization Act (GPRAMA) 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.