Friday, October 17, 2008

Evaluating Government

Government Executive has a piece on Bush's PART (Program Assessment Rating Tool),with comments by academics. Bottomline for me: programs are hard to evaluate, particularly because many represent an imperfect blending of different ideas and goals held by different sponsors in Congress (and the Administration). Which was/is our goal in Iraq?

And the fact that neither Congress nor the public buy in to the evaluations is critical. Bureaucrats in an agency will respond to what the appropriate Congressman wants, not to what is written on PART.

No comments: