Performance and the Bush administration

What’s the fundamental problem with the Bush Administration? They don’t like to do the basic research needed to plan ahead and make policy, they don’t like to look at the evidence to see if what they are doing is working, and they rarely take responsibility for things that have gone wrong. (I do want to applaud GW for recently inching toward personal responsibility on the Katrina relief disaster).

I urge everyone to read the book The Price of Loyalty by Ron Suskind* about former Bush II Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, which illustrates the perilous lack of evidenced-based policy-making in the Bush administration and a culture of blind action.

Leaders set the tone for any organization and the Bush Administration has certainly sent a clear message that appointments are not based on merit and that decisions do not need to be based on information. A recent article based on a Government Accountancy Office (GAO) report shows that use of information to make and deliver policies is poor.

In 2004, a GAO study concluded that "while the percentage of federal managers who report having performance measures for their programs has increased over time, their use of performance information in making key management decisions, such as adopting new program approaches or changing work processes, has not." [my emphasis]

What does that mean? It means that federal government employees don’t look at information that they already have about what to do next, never mind seek new information. (e.g. make a decision about reinforcing a levee or estimating adequate numbers of troops and equipment for occupying Iraq)

But never mind that, the Bush Administration wants to use the performance information for performance related pay. From the same article:

The Bush administration is focused on moving the federal workforce to a
performance-based personnel system, including a hotly debated
pay-for-performance structure. The Defense and Homeland Security departments are
working out the kinks in their pay-for-performance systems, and a similar one is
being floated for extension government wide.

That’s more than a bit worrying, since the Bush Administration has already stuffed Homeland Security and it’s subsidiaries (FEMA) with cronies and incompetents. What do you bet that performance related pay will be used more to reward political loyalty than honestly evaluating performance and delivering improvements?

*since I nearly always include a little personal anecdote in every commentary, here it is: Me and the Vol-in-Law went to see Ron Suskind speak in London on Inauguration Day this year. He was one of the best, most entertaining speakers I’d seen in a long time. He was selling and signing books afterward and I lined up to get one. “What should we ask him to put inside the front cover?” I said. The Vol-in-Law didn’t care. “How ‘bout if we just get him to sign it, not put our names in, and then if we don’t like it we can give it to someone else as a gift?”

You know those moments when suddenly conversation lulls and whatever you were saying then sounds real loud? Yeah, well that happened to me just then. Suskind looks up at me, annoyed. When we get to him, he asks us our names and writes it on the inside of the book in real big letters. BTW, it’s a really good read and I wouldn’t give it away, I wouldn’t even loan it out.