Got a email from the nice folks over at OMB this morning about my blog post last week on the release of new PART scores and some of the shortcomings of the PART website. The email was surprising for two reasons: first, they read the BudgetBlog. (ok, so that's not so surprising as we all know everybody who is anybody reads the BudgetBlog.) Second, and perhaps more surprising, they have changed the spreadsheet that lists all PART scores that you can download from ExpectMore.gov to include a column for "Last Year Assessed." Now anyone can easily tell when the last assessment was done for each program. Fantastic! Way to go OMB! (I feel slightly more influential today than I did yesterday, which really wasn't very influential at all.)

OMB also reported they are working to improve the search engine on the site so the most recent review links are returned when searching for programs. This is also excellent news, with one caveat: I'd still like to have access to the links to the older reviews available when I search, just not as the first items that are returned from the search engine. Instead of removing those links entirely from the search results (or from the site altogether), it would be better to list the reviews chronologically. Then users can tell when each assessment happened and allows them to compare between assessments to see what has changed. When I searched for our old friend - the Administration on Aging (AoA) - this afternoon, the search returned links to the 2007 review pages, but do not list those conducted in 2003. The links for the 2003 reviews no longer work.

Since I suspect that OMB may read this and was very responsive in taking a previous suggestion of mine, perhaps I'll try it again. Here's what I'd like to see (click the image to enlarge):

1) Expand the posting of "Last Year Assessed" data to the summary view for each program, in addition to listing it in the assessment details page and raw data in spreadsheets.

2) Links to older assessments from previous years (where applicable) on the most recent summary view for each program. So for the AoA, you would be able to click on a link in the 2007 review that took you to all past reviews.

So a big thank you to OMB for incorporating some user suggestions to their website, and here's hoping we can keep improving it. If this works, I'm asking for the out-year discretionary spending details from the President's budget - those always seem to get leaked eventually, but it would be nice to have them upfront. Who knows how far this might go...

Good news- the Webb-McCaskill Wartime Contracting Commission amendment passed the Senate last night, too! Here's the press release. It got unanimous approval.

However, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the amendment was water down to get approval. Most importantly, the commission wouldn't have subpoena power under this draft.

Now it's on to the House. Rep. John Tierney (D-MA) has introduced a bill that set up a commission, too.

Prof. Ellen Danin has an interesting paper arguing that much of the debate about privatization is really about accountability, in one form or another. Here's the abstract:

The popular view is that the debate on privatization is about cost and efficiency. This was true at one time when most of the discussion involved battling theories concerning markets versus social and economic justice issues. At the extreme, those who advocated privatization argued that markets and competition could always be relied upon to provide the highest quality services at the lowest cost. They preferred letting individuals decide how best to meet their own needs, rather than ceding that role to politicians or bureaucrats. Unions and those concerned with economic and social justice issues often took a "just say no" approach to contracting out.

Today, it is easier to see that arguments for or against privatization are actually about accountability. This is not to say that markets, cost, efficiency, individual liberty, and social and economic justice are issues absent from today's discussions; rather, it means that they are most often ways of talking about accountability. Those who prefer markets argue that markets best provide meaningful accountability. Those concerned about social and economic justice believe that those values are better protected by public rather than private methods of accountability. That this was the case has been somewhat obscured by the fact that the battleground over privatization has most often been on turf defined by the language, thoughts, and values of economics.

If this insight is correct, the central issue for privatization is accountability. That is, issues of accountability may subsume all arguments about the merits and wisdom of privatization. What, then, are the accountability arguments made by proponents and opponents of privatization? What do private and public sector methods for ensuring accountability tell us about the allocation of providing services? Does public accountability have a deeper function than merely ensuring that value for money is received? If public provision and public accountability are part of the fabric of a participatory democracy, what then is the impact of removing those functions from public provision?

In the paper, Danin also challenges the assumption that markets provide sufficient pressure to hold contractors accountable. Privatization promoters often argue that the market is essentially a cost-free way of making service providers perform efficiently, while governmental "red tape" is a costly way of doing the same thing to government workers. There's a trade-off between accountability and efficiency for government workers, but not for private sector workers.

But without proper contract management and administration, Danin shows that contractors have been found to perform inefficiently. So if "red tape" is necessary to hold contractors accountable for cost containment, perhaps the trade-off isn't quite so large, or in some cases, non-existant. The cost-savings to privatization cannot be taken for granted.

And quick tangent: it looks like Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo is getting into cost issues vis-a-vis military contractors. Awesome!

The Senate is now debating the wartime contracing commission bill as an amendment to the defense authorization act. Check out C-SPAN now (it's 1:45) and call your Senators!

Posted by Matt Lewis, 01:49:04 PM

Tuesday, September 25, 2007