OMB makes new case to win Hill support for e-gov

Having failed over the past 4 1/2 years to convince Congress of the virtues of e-government, the Office of Management and Budget is making an unprecedented attempt to sell the idea to lawmakers and secure funding for fiscal 2006.

Actually, the lead is a little generous to the administration. The administration is accused of unorthodox maneuvers in passing the hat to agencies to fund e-rulemaking, and Congress ever so gently slapped the administration for it.

One hopes the administration will take this time not just to get back in congressional appropriators' good graces but also to reevaluate the current e-rulemaking system and improve upon the lousy product that contractor Lockheed Martin has been building.

Posted by Robert Shull, 06:30:40 PM



PART: Finally, Someone Else Gets It
At OMB Watch, we're pretty accustomed to working on issues that go under the radar. Such has long been the case with PART, the White House's tool for assessing program performance (supposedly). We have been telling anyone who will listen that PART is a political tool, not a measurement of "results" or "effectiveness," which the White House uses to justify lousy budget choices and to send management signals to agencies that would take government programs in the wrong directions.

Now someone else has come across PART and realized what a load of propaganda it is. Check out ThinkProgress.org's truthcheck of some of the assessments in this year's PART.

Posted by Robert Shull, 06:10:58 PM



PARTly Sunny, PARTly Cloudy
With the release of the White House's budget submission comes, of course, the latest PART scores. In an effort to be tech-fancy, OMB created a new website, ExpectMore.Gov, to feature PART assessments. Only the homepage was working this morning, and now the pieces that are working are either not completely functional or spotty, taking you sometimes to data and other times to the 404-error page.

Techie stuff aside, it's interesting to observe that OMB has simultaneously made PART info both MORE and LESS accessible. More accessible: the new database format makes it easier to narrow the universe of information and zoom in on just the program you are concerned about. Less accessible: the database has completely replaced the comprehensive information that the White House used to publish, which would allow you to get an overview of PART and look across the entire universe of information for broader patterns. Click here and here for the documents from past years that are now no longer available. (At least the spreadsheet is still available.)

Posted by Robert Shull, 02:56:06 PM