On October 22, 1995, the Regional Administrator of EPA’s New England office, John DeVillars, proclaimed to the press and all who would listen that the long- contaminated Lower Charles River - running between Cambridge and Boston out to the Boston Harbor - would be clean enough for swimming by 2005. Hooray, river advocates cheered, daring to dream for what had so long seemed impossible. Outrageous, skeptics cried. The sources of contamination to the river were not even known. How could the river be clean enough to swim in within ten years? Five years after the initial announcement, as this paper is being written, DeVillars’ promise is becoming reality. By April 2000, the Lower Charles River was clean enough for boating 90 percent of the time, up from 39 percent in 1995. It was safe for swimming 65 percent of the time, compared to 19 percent five years earlier. (2001 case study)

This article reflects on the purposes, tools, uses and users of effective government performance management and on lessons learned from the U.S. federal government after thirty-years implementing the federal law mandating government-wide performance management, the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 amended by the GPRA Modernization Act of 2010. The article also discusses progress made and challenges encountered and offers recommendations for future improvement, mostly for the federal government but with a few for others.

Implementing policies and programs well requires good quality evidence. Producing good evidence is not enough, however. Evidence must also be communicated successfully to key evidence users in a timely manner so they have it when they need it. Evidence users must be aware of and able to find, access, understand, accurately interpret, and appropriately absorb and apply evidence. This brief discusses the different ways evidence can be communicated to different types of users and the importance of evidence being timely, readily available, and comprehensible.

This brief explores the purposes and potential uses of evidence for three discrete but complementary purposes: informing focus, finding what works, and spreading what works (increasing the use of better practices and reducing use of less effective or harmful ones.) In addition, evidence can be useful for building understanding of and trust in government.

The grants management landscape has changed over the past few decades, with new laws, administrative processes, technologies, and expectations for increasing the use of data and evidence to boost federal program the effectiveness.

We should not use program evaluations primarily to define programs as “effective” or “ineffective,” but to help find ways to improve.

Accountability is a term often used when talking about government. This paper explores what “accountability" and “being held accountable” mean, which government accountability practices worked well in the past, which did not, and lessons to apply to future accountability arrangements so they are more likely to work well.

The 2019 Evidence Act’s purpose is to build and share knowledge relevant to the objectives federal agencies seek to advance, and then apply that knowledge to federal funding and other activities to realize better government and real-world results. As agencies create learning agendas for themselves, conduct evaluations, and share and analyze their data, they will be able to gather and disseminate important evidence on which programs advance progress and which do not. But will this evaluation and evidence-building capacity also be used to improve program performance? Expanding on a panel about how agencies can engage external stakeholders in creating their learning agendas at the Urban Institute on January 23rd, 2020, Dr. Metzenbaum suggested that the questions asked in learning agendas should not only focus on whether or not a program works, but also—and arguably more important—on how to improve the program. Evidence, including that from data analytics and evaluations, can enhance public programs in many ways — detect problems and opportunities, set priorities, design treatments, assess programs and practices, and adapt processes for continual improvement.

The Trump Administration’s guidance to remove the data from the president’s budget is counterproductive—federal agencies should be increasing their use of performance information to improve results.

See my author archive page on Government Executive to see all of my articles for the publication.

This report, released just prior to the 2009 U.S. Presidential election, reviews lessons learned from past government performance management efforts and makes recommendations for improvement. A key recommendation is that performance information be used to improve performance, not just report it.

See my author page on Governing.com to see all of my articles for the publication.

Metzenbaum sets forth five building blocks - tools and techniques for constructing a good measurement system for an organization — and six practices that leaders need to use to make appropriately designed systems work properly.

This 2003 report examines how federal agencies should adapt their activities now that all federal agencies and most states are moving to results-focused management, especially in the context of technology advances that make public access to and analysis of performance information more affordable.

An open memorandum from a bipartisan group of current and former government executives, business leaders, public management scholars, and journalists urging incoming government leaders to make results-focused management a priority and to embrace performance management, the use of goals and performance measures, as a critical aspect of their leadership.