Tools of Control? Comparing Congressional and Presidential Performance Management Reforms

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.